ChatGPT hallucinating about Platform Journalism

Platform Journalism. It is the central concept of my current research. While I am yet to publish an academic article on it, I have written about it at the Centre for Media Transition (CMT) and Independent Australia.

With all the hype around AI, I couldn’t help ask ChatGPT what it knew about my research topic. And the answers are shocking!

First, I asked “What is platform journalism?”

The answer was a good guess, though it is more in line with the idea of digital journalism.

I then asked who came up with the term platform journalism, and I was a little disappointment it didn’t name me.

Finally, and most important of all, especially if you want to rely on AI for factual information, I asked ChatGPT to give me sources for its info on platform journalism. It gave me three “reputable sources”. The only problem was that they were all fake.

Each one included the names of real people. The publishers it mentioned actually exist. Though the papers that it is referring to don’t exist. The third article is apparently a Guardian article from 2015 called, “The Rise of Platform Journalism”. I was shocked. Not only does that article not exist, that is the name of my short piece on the topic that I published in a CMT newsletter!

I asked it these questions on 20th March 2023. Perhaps it has updated its database since then so if you ask the same questions you may get better answers