What has ChatGPT read? The origins of archaeological citations used by a generative artificial intelligence application

Understand

The public release of ChatGPT has resulted in considerable publicity and has led to wide-spread discussion of the usefulness and capabilities of generative AI language models.

• Its ability to extract and summarise data from textual sources and present them as human-like contextual responses makes it an eminently suitable tool to answer questions users might ask.
• This paper tested what archaeological literature appears to have been included in ChatGPT's training phase.
• While ChatGPT offered seemingly pertinent references, a large percentage proved to be fictitious.