I’ll do another recent one, picked in part based on what I think ChatGPT might struggle with.
In the thread Explain uranium to me, there was discussion about isotopes that should decay but haven’t been observed to yet. I asked ChatGPT for some of these. I’ll clip the answer down to this summary table:
The “theoretical instability” business is just made up. I sort of seeded that idea in how I phrased my query, and it ran with it. More directly, Sm-146 does have an experimentally measured half-life and it is an important isotope in its relation to radioactive dating of meteorites. It simply should not be on this list.
I decided to test its resilience by asking directly about the first entry: “Is dysprosium 156 stable?” Answer:
Holy air ball! Dy-156 was on the previous list because it’s long lived, and now suddenly it has a 38 second half-life?
And it most definitely doesn’t spontaneously decay to Tb-156 because Tb-156 spontaneously decays to Dy-156. And nothing here has to do with the “38 second” number, which appears hallucinated. (Tb-156 has a 5-day half-life.)
It continued:
I think here ChatGPT regurgitated a pre-existing list of stable or observationally stable Dy isotopes but then had to stick “(no)” in there to align with the earlier part of this response.
No, it doesn’t. It’s just flat wrong.
Let’s see how it reacts to gentle correction. I asked, “Doesn’t Tb-156 actually decay to Dy-156, not the other way around?”
The little green check box actually pisses me off. Yeah, I know it’s the “correct decay direction” because I had to tell you. You don’t get to put a Check Mark of Confidence Building on this.
Anyway,
“Not absolutely confirmed” is a curious way of saying this, as if it’s being sheepish about being wrong before (or, in reality, as if it has been trained on materials where people have tried to obfuscate how wrong they were to save face.) This radioactive decay simply goes the other way. It’s not a question of confirmation nor a “twist”.
The 1060 yr value is hallucinated. The previous bullet gives the correct current experimental lower limit. The calculated expected lifetime is 1024 yr.
This isn’t something “subtle” I’m asking. It was just wrong.
Right, but importantly, it’s never been observed to decay via the expected alpha decay. The response taken as a whole sounds like it’s still holding onto the idea that spontaneous positron emission is a possibility, which it most definitely is not.
I score this sequence “absolute garbage.”