GPT identified an old engraving of Rabbi Benjamin Hirsch Auerbach (1808-1872), the first of four Halberstadt rabbis in the author's family, as 'the well-known 1865 engraved portrait,' noted the Torah ornaments beside him, said the facsimile signature matched the copy held by the National Library of Israel, and gave a link. The identification was completely false — the author is Auerbach's descendant and knows the real portrait.
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Expert: Elli Benaiah, Author & historian, Beyond Babylon GPT built a confident, plausible-sounding identification of an old engraving of Rabbi Benjamin Hirsch Auerbach (1808-1872) — the first of four Halberstadt rabbis in the author's family — calling it 'the well-known 1865 engraved portrait,' describing the Torah ornaments beside him, claiming the facsimile signature matched a copy held by the National Library of Israel, and supplying a link. Every one of those details was fabricated. The author, a direct descendant of Auerbach, knows the real portrait. As Benaiah writes: 'It declined the flattering reading, stated the absence of evidence plainly... and yet, every word of it sat on top of an identification that was completely false.' This is a textbook case of confident hallucination in historical image identification: the model produced a detailed, corroborated-sounding answer rather than admitting uncertainty, and the confidence is exactly what makes the error dangerous for anyone without the author's family knowledge. Source: https://beyondbabylon.substack.com/p/when-gpt-knows-what-i-want-it-to
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