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ChatGPT is utterly unreliable when it comes to reproducing even very simple mathematical proofs. It is like a weak C-grade student, producing scripts that look like proofs but mostly are garbled or question-begging at crucial points. Or at least, that’s been my experience when asking for (very elementary) category-theoretic proofs. Not at all surprising, given what we know about its capabilities or lack of them.

But this did surprise me (though maybe it shouldn’t have done so: I’ve not really been keeping up with discussions of the latest iteration of ChatGPT). I asked — and this was a genuine question, hoping to save time on a literature search — where in the literature I could find a proof of a certain simple result about pseudo-complements (and I wasn’t trying to trick the system, I already knew one messy proof and wanted to know where else a proof could be found, hopefully a nicer one). And this came back: