The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement::The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, alleging that the companies’ artificial intelligence technology illegally copied millions of Times articles to train ChatGPT and other services to provide people with information – technology that now competes with the Times.
Prompting for a source wouldn’t satisfy me until I could trust that the AI wasn’t hallucinating. After all, if GPT can make up facts about things like legal precedent or well documented events, why would I trust that its citations are legitimate?
And if the suggestion is that the person asking for the information double check the cited sources, maybe that’s reasonable to request, but it somewhat defeats the original purpose.
Bing might be doing things differently though, so you might be right in your assessment on that front. I haven’t played with their AI yet.
You did ask if ChatGPT had ever sighted sources. Bing uses it and besides, you can ask for that manually.
Whether it defeats the purpose depends on your original purpose.