NiemanLab, Andrew Deck: “Over the past year, several major news media companies have signed on the dotted line with OpenAI, entering a content licensing partnership with the developer of ChatGPT. Most of those partnership announcements state that as part of the deals, ChatGPT will produce attributed summaries of each media company’s reporting and link to their publications’ websites.On June 13, I reported that despite its deal, ChatGPT is outputting hallucinated links to one such partnered publication, Business Insider. Using details from a leaked letter written by the Business Insider Union’s steward, I confirmed the chatbot is generating fake URLs for some of the outlet’s biggest investigations and directing some users to 404 errors instead of real article pages. Now, my reporting confirms that ChatGPT is hallucinating URLs for at least 10 other publications that are part of OpenAI’s ongoing licensing deals. These publications include The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Times (UK), Le Monde, El País, The Atlantic, The Verge, Vox, and Politico.In my testing, I repeatedly prompted ChatGPT to link out to these publications’ marquee articles, including Pulitzer Prize-winning stories and years-long investigations. These types of stories are editorial investments that can be both incredibly valuable to a brand’s reputation, and incredibly costly to produce. All together, my tests show that ChatGPT is currently unable to reliably link out to even these most noteworthy stories by partner publications. While the specific language differs, most partnered media companies have explicitly stated that ChatGPT will link out to their websites. “Queries that surface The Atlantic will include attribution and a link to read the full article on theatlantic.com,” reads The Atlantic’s licensing deal announcement from last month. “ChatGPT’s answers to user queries will include attribution and links to the full articles for transparency and further information,” reads a similar announcement by Berlin-based publisher Axel Springer from December 2023. OpenAI has also pitched news publishers “priority placement and ‘richer brand expression’ in chat conversations” and “more prominent link treatments” in ChatGPT, according to reporting earlier this year by Adweek on leaked OpenAI slide decks.