Quick Links
Key Takeaways
By feeding ChatGPT text into Bing AI, you can have Bing check ChatGPT's statements against real sources that you can review yourself.
ChatGPT and Bing AI chat are both incredibly powerful tools. At the same time, they have some maddening limitations, but when you put them together, you can address the issue of ChatGPT falsehoods and Bing AI limits.
ChatGPT and Bing AI: A Match Made in Heaven
Assuming the ChatGPT service is available, or you're a paying ChatGPT Plus customer, there are few limits to what you can ask ChatGPT to do. It can help you with almost any type of task or work, and the sky's the limit, it would seem.
However, ChatGPT will often make up facts, and its training data only spans to September 2021. So it doesn't know anything that's happened in the intervening years, at least not until the training data is updated.
While it's easy to get ChatGPT to include formatted citations in the text it generates, if you've actually tried this, you'll find that these tend to be sources that don't exist! Despite seeming completely plausible, many of these sources are AI "hallucinations".
Bing AI chat, on the other hand, is directly connected to the internet and can find any information on the web. That said, Bing AI has strict guardrails put in place that ChatGPT doesn't have, and you're limited in the number of interactions you can have with Bing before wiping the slate clean and starting again.
By feeding inputs and outputs between these two tools, you can go a long way to relieving the limitations of both.
Generating Text to Test With ChatGPT
We'll start things off by asking ChatGPT to generate text for us. We're going to use the default GPT 3.5 Turbo model here, but if you're a ChatGPT Plus subscriber you can use the (slower) GPT 4 model which is significantly less prone to making stuff up.
In this example, we're going to ask it to write a concise explanation of how we know the Earth isn't flat.
Now we have the text, but for all we know, this could all be made-up nonsense. A round Earth? That's ridiculous!
How to Fact-Check GPT Text with Bing AI
Now we'll head over to Bing's AI chat feature at bing.com/new. You may have to join a waitlist, but the process has been sped up, so you won't have to wait very long and all you need is a Microsoft account.
We're going to use this prompt to get Bing to check the ChatGPT output:
Insert citations in this text to support its statements:
Before submitting the prompt, paste the text from ChatGPT after the colon.
Bing gives your text back with citations next to the relevant sentences.
Of course, you don't have to do it this way, you can ask Bing AI to check if the text you've provided is factually correct without inserting citations.
The first example simply makes it easier to put relevant citations back into your GPT-generated text.
Getting Bing AI to Create Formatted Citations for ChatGPT Text
By default, Bing uses superscript numbers to indicate citations, but you can actually ask it to format citations any way you'd like. Let's take the text again and give it this prompt.
Insert APA-style references into this text and include an APA-style reference list at the end:
Then we get the requisite text back.
If you don't like the sources, you can ask Bing to try again but use different sources. For example, you may only want sources from journal articles or only want ones after a certain date. Experiment with different prompts and save the ones that work best for you.
While you're refining your work with chatbots, you'll probably also be interested in learning to make your writing stand out from AI-generated content.
And if you're looking for other ways to get the most out of AI chatbots, learn how to create ChatGPT personas, how to run an AI chatbot on your own PC, or what happens when you let ChatGPT be your chef.