It is evidence that the move to use artificial intelligence chatbots like this to provide results for web searches is happening too fast, says Carissa Véliz at the University of Oxford. “The possibilities for creating misinformation on a mass scale are huge,” she says.

…Véliz says the error, and the way it slipped through the system, is a prescient example of the danger of relying on AI models when accuracy is important.

“It perfectly shows the most important weakness of statistical systems. These systems are designed to give plausible answers, depending on statistical analysis – they’re not designed to give out truthful answers,” she says.