We all know by now that ChatGPT is full of incorrect data but I trusted it will no go wrong after I asked for a list of sci-fi books recommendations (short stories anthologies in Spanish mostly) including book names, editorial, print year and of course ISBN.
Some of the books do exist but the majority are nowhere to be found. I pick the one that caught my interest the most and contacted the editorial directly after I did not find it in their website or anywhere else.
This is what they replied (Google Translate):
ChatGPT got it wrong.
We don't have any books with that title.
In the ISBN that has given you the last digit is incorrect. And the correct one (9788477028383) corresponds to "The Holy Fountain" by Henry James.
Nor have we published any science fiction anthologies in the last 25 years.
I quick search in the "old site" shows that others have experienced the same with ChatGPT and ISBN searches... For some reason I thought it will no go wrong in this case, but it did.
ChatGPT does not have an understanding of the world. It's able to guess book titles because book titles have a format and it's training data had book lists in it.
You could make the same case for you not understanding anything outside of your experiential knowledge. You are only able to name COVID variants because you read/heard about them somewhere. Fundamentally any idea outside of your experience is just a nexus of linked concepts in your head. For example COVID omicron is a combination of your concept of COVID along with an idea of it being a mutation/variant and it being more contagious maybe added in with a couple other facts you read about it. This linking of ideas forms your understanding and chatgpt is able to form these connections just as well as a person. Unless you want to make a case that understanding necessitates experience chatgpt understands a lot about the world. If you make that case though then you don't understand evolution, microbiology, history etc. anything that you just read about in your training data.