Anyone seduced by A.I.-powered chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard — wow, they can write essays and recipes! — eventually runs into what are known as hallucinations, the tendency for artificial intelligence to fabricate information.The chatbots, which guess what to say based on information obtained from all over the internet, can’t help but get things wrong. And when they fail — by publishing a cake recipe with wildly inaccurate flour measurements, for instance — it can be a real buzzkill.Yet as mainstream tech tools continue to integrate A.I., it’s crucial to get a handle on how to use it to serve us. After testing dozens of A.I. products over the last two months, I concluded that most of us are using the technology in a suboptimal way, largely because the tech companies gave us poor directions.The chatbots are the least beneficial when we ask them q …
