this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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I was recently reading Ben Aaronvitch’s ‘Rivers of London’ and I was struggling to follow the plot. So I engaged in discussions with both ChatGPT and Gemini and both really struggled to not make lots of mistakes. Both AIs would regularly give inaccurate info about major plot points, and when I questioned them about those issues, they would apologize profusely and then try to continue on. I basically had to coach them through to get them to remember important points of the plot! They also struggled to not reveal spoilers past a certain chapter. It was interesting to see the AIs repeatedly fail.

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[–] MooseInMaine@lemmy.world 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I did have a much better discussion of 'Moby Dick' a while ago, but I imagine there is lots of info that AI has scraped from scholarly articles and the like about classics.

[–] sudoMakeUser@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

They don't do well with big sources like books unless they're discussed. If there's no online references or scholarly articles it won't know the contents of the book. Same with movies or music.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 3 points 19 hours ago

Right and even if it "knew" the contents it still couldn't interpret them or have a discussion about the meaning.