Comment by gwern

I think there's still something missing here. This is a strange place for ChatGPT to confabulate quotes: extracting short quotes from a short text blog post is about easy as it gets these days. GPT-5.2 Pro can handle tens of thousands of words for me before I start to notice any small omissions or confabulations, and this was confabulating all that at just 1.5k words?

So since he says he was sick and his recollection cannot be trusted (I don't blame him, the second-to-last time I had COVID-19, I can barely remember anything about the worst day - which was Christmas Day), something seems to be missing. He may not have pasted in the blog post like he remembers. Or perhaps he got routed to a cheap model; it wouldn't surprise me if he was using a free tier, that accounts for a lot of these stories where GPT-5 underperforms and would explain a lot of stupidity by the GPT. Or didn't use GPT at all, who knows.