ChatGPT just made up a bunch of commercial airline crashes in 2023 that never happened, and I wonder why.

I’m new to using ChatGPT. I’m a nervous traveler with a big international trip coming up, and I asked ChatGPT if there had been any fatal accidents involving major commercial airlines in 2023. ChatGPT said yes, there had been 32 fatal accidents. I was a little shocked that I hadn’t heard of any of this, so I asked him to tell me what it was, and he proceeded to give me a list of airlines, fatalities, dates, etc. – but in fact, there apparently have been no fatal accidents involving commercial airlines in 2023, so almost everything ChatGPT said was basically fiction.

It became clear that this was false when I was told that an airline that ceased operations in 2016 had a fatal accident in 2023.

How is it possible that this is so inaccurate, how often is it so inaccurate, and why/how could he make things up and confidently claim them as fact, especially something as egregious as 32 fatal commercial airline crashes? He really went on a very confident rant about all of these crashes in several replies as I continued to probe, but when I said it was false, he immediately responded with “You’re right, there were no fatal crashes.”

For example, it is mentioned that an Ethiopian Airlines Bombardier crashed on March 13, 2023, which not only did not happen last year, but never even seems to have happened, even on different dates. Some of the other flights mentioned crashed, but on different dates or with different details, while others are pure fabrication. It’s almost like garbled information pulled from a bunch of different sources to end up making something fictional. Screenshots of some of them, to give an idea:

https://preview.redd.it/0ffvovghghgd1.png?width=859&format=png&auto=webp&s=ca9bef495873f5f28056d40d078c17d74cc030c8