Behind the Curtain
Where made-up answers come from
A language model on its own doesn't look things up and occasionally lie — it composes likely-sounding text, and sometimes likely-sounding is all it is.
Next time an AI gives you a suspiciously tidy fact, ask: "Is this something frequently written about, or something rare and specific?" Common knowledge tends to come out right; rare specifics — an obscure person, an exact figure, a small-town detail — are where composition quietly replaces knowledge. Verify anything that matters.
Why it works
The model generates what would plausibly appear next in text like yours. Where its training data was thick, plausible tracks true. Where it was thin, the machinery runs anyway — and produces something shaped exactly like a fact.
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