ChatGPT versus the New York Times

When I started out as a copy-editor at Penguin Books in the late 1980s, the chief executive of the company was Peter Mayer. London born but New York-raised, Mayer extended the Penguin convention of italicizing The Times to The New York Times.

In this way, while, say, the Guardian or the Washington Post or the Daily Telegraph was treated like any other newspaper, The Times and The New York Times were singled out as special.

And for many years, long after Peter Mayer returned to New York, I continued to consider The New York Times special. The chief reason, for me, was its reputation for truth and accuracy – a quality that I prize even more today, in this supposed “Post-Truth Age”.

So I was very interested when a couple of days ago, under the title “Mistakes, We’ve Made a Few”, The New York Times published a piece on the importance that it has attached over the years to correcting errors. The very status that it has enjoyed of “if-it’s-in-The-Times-it-must-be-true”, the article pointed out, put pressure on the newspaper “to account for missteps”. The piece ended with an amusing example of a mistake that never actually happened: “Yes, The Times has a strict policy on honorifics. But no, Meat Loaf, the musician, was never referred to as ‘Mr. Loaf’ on second reference. Believable, to be sure, but incorrect.”

I felt reassured that it would be quite a while before The New York Times would have to account for another misstep. But then the very next day I read the following paragraph in an opinion piece about Silicon Valley:

“Throughout history, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful erected monuments that redefined their cities and communities. French monarchs built the Arc de Triomphe. Industrial tycoons funded the New York Public Library. The Medicis filled Florence with art.”

It seemed to me a glaring error, which jumped out all the more for being in such a short paragraph. “They've probably sacked their subs, like the London Times,” an old Penguin friend commented. “The money goes into paying comment moderators these days.”

So I skimmed through the 567 readers’ comments. I could find no one else who showed any sign of being aware of the mistake. Was I being too exacting, then, to expect The New York Times to catch it and correct it?

The headline of the piece reminded me of that famous quotation – misattributed to Oscar Wilde – about how America “is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between”. But I thought that even in the Age of Decadence, you would still have expected The New York Times to hold the line, and it was disturbingly ironic that the obvious place I went to fact-check the piece was Silicon Valley.

“Please could you fact-check this short extract from a recent article in The New York Times,” I asked ChatGPT, It answered immediately that the claim that “French monarchs built the Arc de Triomphe” was “misleading, and literally false”. The Arc de Triomphe, it went on, had been “commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte to commemorate the victories of his armies. The French government itself records that Napoleon ordered its construction and that the foundation stone was laid in 1806.”

Even when it came to the article’s claim about The New York Times’s own home town – that “Industrial tycoons funded the New York Public Library” – ChatGPT, the West Coast barbarian upstart, found fault: “There is a kernel of truth here, but the plural “industrial tycoons” gives a quite different impression from what actually happened.”

It explained that the New York Public Library was created in 1895 through the consolidation of the Astor Library, the Lenox Library and the Tilden Trust. But John Jacob Astor, James Lenox and Samuel J. Tilden were not a trio of industrial tycoons: their fortunes and careers were rooted respectively in fur and real estate; commerce and collecting; and law and politics.

Of course ChatGPT itself is still prone to spectacular hallucinations, but when I questioned its suggestion that the inscription “FONDÉ PAR NAPOLÉON EN 1806, TERMINÉ PAR LOUIS PHILIPPE I EN 1836” could be seen on the Arc de Triomphe, it abandoned that pig-headed certainty which I had found one of its most irritating features: “Ah — I need to correct something important from my earlier answer. That inscription is not on the Arc de Triomphe itself. I mistakenly presented it as though it were a contemporary inscription on the monument.”

It was an encouraging bit of humility that I hope its developers will enhance in the months ahead. But as for The New York Times, I'm afraid it’s just the New York Times from now on.