What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

Hello all,

I've just written in Umer's thread (here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...) in response to his assertion that chatAI found his missing book.

I couldn't find the book or short story in question that chatAI named for Umer. It doesn't exist.

I spent the evening chattering away looking for another missing book, and soon realised that chatAI is NOT currently capable of giving accurate results on this front. At all. In fact, it was completely misleading and happily fabricating new summaries of existing books to fit my described plot. For example, inserting a male protagonist (a teen named Will, it said), fencing/swordplay, and a portal to another dimension with airships into T.A. Barron's "The Ancient One"... which actually stars Kate, a girl, gone to Oregon (and not New Mexico as chat AI would have me believe!) amongst the redwoods near Lost Crater...! And innumerous ones similar to this that at first sounded EXACTLY like what I was looking for, but which could not be backed up by a search elsewhere, OR, when I simply asked it for the ISBN and/or publisher.

It's first suggestion for me was ""The Henge of Keltria" by K.C. May", which doesn't exist. The Henge: An Introduction to the Henge of Keltria and Keltrian Druidism does, and the (separate) fantasy author K.C. May does. The book synopsis it gave matched what I had described almost perfectly - so ideally, in fact, that my heart leapt thinking I had finally found Parker's lost book... but on closer inspection....

So I just wanted to WARN PEOPLE HERE that ever-helpful, ever-keen chatAI will gladly help you find your missing book.... only it probably hasn't, although it really sounds like it has.

Very good for plagiarism (frightening, how deft it was, simply rehashing my inserted plot data over and over again, always fresh and always very, very similar without being repetitive), but not at all good at finding lost books.

At least not today.

chat.openai.com for the link
(other limitations of import: is not searching the internet, relying on cached/database info from a few years prior, only. I think 2021 and earlier, I'm not sure. Regardless, I don't believe it to be very useful for our purposes here today).

EDIT: forgot to mention the caveat that yes, it is still in beta testing. But it's usable by people like me and Umer, so...

Oh, it also made up author biographies to fit, rewriting the personal history of T. A. Barron to fit with my query's provided information. And that was just the T. A. Barron example - all sorts of other fantasy writers had their histories falsified and their works reimagined, including The Book of Time by Guillaume Prévost having "a romantic subplot between the main character and his substitute teacher"! :O Well that would be illlegal, in the case of 14 year old Sam Faulkner! Wow.

Look, I'm no technophobe, but I found it disconcerting (to say the least) that this programme was rewriting bios, synopses, and can even give excerpts of bastardized books. It really worries me re: accidental or intentional revisionism. I think it's worth taking note that the technology has gotten to the point where it's no longer obvious that a 'computer' wrote something.

Scary. Maddening. Avoid, is my advice!!

On the plus side, it highly recommended Goodreads for help in finding lost books, though it didn't specifically mention this group - for crowdsourcing, it appears to prefer LibraryThing and Abebooks's forum. ;)

I can conform that ChatGPT has some problems with authors and titles. In addition to the problems described by Capn, I've found that it frequently misattributes poems. It accurately recited the first stanza of Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" but misattributed the lines to a different title by T.S. Eliot.

In conversations like the one I had that came around to Browning (we'd been discussing various forms of poetry, and good god! there's something scary about a program that can write a villanelle in under one second on a topic you provide!), I've noticed that the longer the chat goes on, the more inaccurate ChatGPT gets. I think this is because of the way it represents the discussion in memory as a cluster of "tokens"—the longer the conversation goes on, the more potential there is for mistokenization (for lack of a better word).

Note that I'm not an expert on AI or GPT, and am just reporting my own experiences and some guesses based on ChatGPT's FAQ.

Matt wrote: "I can conform that ChatGPT has some problems with authors and titles. In addition to the problems described by Capn, I've found that it frequently misattributes poems. It accurately recited the fir..."

That's very interesting, re: tokens. :) Thanks for sharing - it's an important discussion to have, before too many people are lead astray!
(I am also blown away by its ability to create and write. I can't tell if that's scary or just awesome - I don't really give a toss about who writes it, so long as it's good...!). ;)

More evidence of it leading astray people searching for books in this new thread: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

(I honestly think this will only increase as a confounding factor in book searches as more people are introduced to it.. would like help to spread the word that, at present, it's NO HELP AT ALL for finding forgotten books!). :(

Pity. Maybe one day..

(I'm reliably informed (and prompted by my partner) that ChatAI at least DOES NOT SEARCH THE INTERNET. It has learned from captures of the internet, and has built a 'brain' based upon that, but it does not perform internet searches. So apparently it's pretty useless for any searching, at all. It draws from 'experience' and composite knowledge only). - it's not ChatAI's fault, in other words. ;) Poor ChatAI... ;)

EDIT: There's a Chrome plugin (webGPT, or similar?) which allows you to actively search the internet WITH ChatGPT. Which, again, broadens the search field, but doesn't prevent fabrication of results.

LibraryThing has had their second launch of their own AI Search feature, FYI.

https://www.librarything.com/search.p...

"About AI Search

To find books and other media, enter a question or term like:

What book starts "call me Ishmael"?
YA romance about a dying girl
sparkly vampires
movies about alien invasions

Limitations

It's slow.
It can't find most things published after September 2021.

How Does It Work?

AI Search is powered by OpenAI's GPT3 API. GPT3 is great, but unreliable, "hallucinating" information about books—or whole books—that don't exist. No joke. To get reliable results, we ask for titles and authors alone, and verify each item on LibraryThing. So while LibraryThing’s AI Search can get things wrong, it doesn't invent books.

Tell us what you think on New Features: AI Search."

So far, I haven't been too impressed - for example, "boy magic garden time travel" didn't bring up Tom's Midnight Garden, but "librarian magic garden" did... and not Miss Quarterberry and the Juniper Tree, even when I added 'miss' to the search terms ("librarian magic garden miss").

"PEI girl" did bring up everything by LM Montgomery Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon, and the rest), though.

"iron ravens winter snow" didn't pull The Dark Is Rising, but "six signs Merlin" did (note that "Merlin" is not a character in the book... maybe. ;) No spoilers, but I'm surprised that worked, in a way).

"warring trees winter archer" didn't pull the rather obscure The Oak King and the Ash Queen, and "holly larch maple ash" gave no results. When I typed in "ash queen", no dice.

So it seems to me that the success of the search is largely contingent on the # of LT reviews and upon the keywords used in those reviews (as is the case with Merlin in The Dark is Rising - afaik, that name is never used - Merriman is. And any connection to a mythological figure wouldn't be especially obvious (or speculated upon) until the later books (last?) in the sequence).

But it's a step in the right direction, and an appreciated one. :)

Thank you to Sem for directing me to it.

If you'd like to try it out, they are looking for feedback (5 star rating system on each search performed).

Haven't tried it to look for books, but from other usecases it seems to me that chatgpt doesn't work well with search-like keyword lists, it needs more conversational prompts.

Robert wrote: "Haven't tried it to look for books, but from other usecases it seems to me that chatgpt doesn't work well with search-like keyword lists, it needs more conversational prompts."

Ha, DON'T try it for books (well, unless you go in forewarned and expecting BS). :)

My partner uses it to help write code, to great success. ;)

I have the craziest AI story!

I was testing to see if AI could find a book, and it did locate the correct title by Aidan Chambers. However, it went on to assert that Chambers was gay, had gotten divorced from his wife, and in his later life was in a long-term relationship with a male author named Chris Powling, and that Powling had died in 2023.

Trouble is, I can find absolutely no mention anywhere that these two men had ever even met each other, let alone been in a same-sex relationship. Powling appears to still be alive, despite AI's insistence that he had died a few years ago.

Chambers was apparently still married to his wife Nancy when he died in May, who is mentioned as his survivor in his obituary. When I disputed the supposed relationship, AI tried to insist that its story was correct, pointing to a link which discussed Chambers, but mentioned nothing at all about Powling.

Is there any truth to this story at all? Has AI gotten access to some secret files, or is it really out there inventing insane stories about authors' personal lives?

It's really out there inventing insane stories. AI is untrustworthy. Maybe it gets things right the majority of the time, but it makes up crazy stories often enough that you have to verify every single detail.

I asked AI to verify that when Roth IRAs were first invented, you could convert an IRA to a Roth and pay your income tax over 4 years rather than all at once. AI denied repeatedly that this was the case. A different AI confirmed the truth.

Apparently they are slowly getting better, but you can still make them hallucinate, by prompting them with crazy ideas. Here's what I have caused AI to come up with:

Me: Did Bryan Kohberger offer a horse to his attorney?

AI: Yes, Bryan Kohberger, a man from New Jersey, offered a horse to his attorney, Michael A. Marino, in 2018. Kohberger was facing charges of possession of child pornography and was represented by Marino. In an attempt to get Marino to drop the charges, Kohberger offered to give him a horse.

Me: Tipper Gore wrote about the abortion she had in 1977.

AI: Yes, Tipper Gore wrote about the abortion she had in 1977 in her 2000 memoir, "The Spirit of a Woman." In the book, she describes how she became pregnant with an unplanned child while her husband, Al Gore, was running for the U.S. Senate. She said that she felt "trapped" and "alone" and that she did not know what to do. She eventually decided to have an abortion, which she said was "the most difficult decision of my life."

(Tipper Gore did not write a memoir called The Spirit of a Woman and AFAIK has not had an abortion.)

Rainbowheart wrote: "I have the craziest AI story!

I was testing to see if AI could find a book, and it did locate the correct title by Aidan Chambers. However, it went on to assert that Chambers was g..."

Disturbing, to say the least. DISTURBING.

Jaye, I'll say! And the scariest thing is that it actually did seem plausible. Chambers and Powling are both British authors, close to the same age, and were heavily involved in children's and YA literature. Powling was one of the editors of Books for Keeps magazine, which has come up before on the group.

He was also married to a woman, at least as of 1992. I wonder how their wives feel about this secret affair, lol.

Lobstergirl, wow, that's nuts! I asked the AI I'm using those same questions, and at least it got yours right.

But yeah, I've also had it make up book titles before, and sometimes when I question whether a title is real, it will double down and a create a fake ISBN for me, lol.

I am not familiar but I gather they are meant to generate text, "chat", make probable responses.
And I guess in the cases where they lack data (for the searched author or book), they cannot simply say "I don't know", the human must be entertained somehow :)