We all know by now that ChatGPT is full of incorrect data but I trusted it will no go wrong after I asked for a list of sci-fi books recommendations (short stories anthologies in Spanish mostly) including book names, editorial, print year and of course ISBN.
Some of the books do exist but the majority are nowhere to be found. I pick the one that caught my interest the most and contacted the editorial directly after I did not find it in their website or anywhere else.
This is what they replied (Google Translate):
ChatGPT got it wrong.
We don’t have any books with that title.
In the ISBN that has given you the last digit is incorrect. And the correct one (9788477028383) corresponds to “The Holy Fountain” by Henry James.
Nor have we published any science fiction anthologies in the last 25 years.
I quick search in the “old site” shows that others have experienced the same with ChatGPT and ISBN searches… For some reason I thought it will no go wrong in this case, but it did.
You asked for fiction so it gave you some on a whole new level.
On a more serious note, other services like bing AI chat are more suited to this. It will behave more like an assistant for this kind of query and be able to search the web for lists of highly rated scifi titles, it can also give you titles similar to something else you enjoyed.
ChatGPT is the same tech behind that but it’s more closed off and unable to do those things properly. If it does spit out some good titles it’ll be both a coincidence and using outdated data from whenever it was last trained.