Category Archives: Posts in English

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Confronting ChatGPT with its Lies

An AI-generated image of Emir Abdelkader using a computer (created using canva.com)

Last month I wrote a blogpost in which I described how ChatGPT made up academic references after I asked it to suggest resources on Emir Abdelkader. The references seemed deceptively authentic, as if ChatGPT had been intent on misleading me.

Later on, I wanted to ‘confront’ ChatGPT with my accusations, so I asked it to analyze that post. Its answer was:

Upon reviewing the article, I noticed that it is written in a satirical tone and is intended to be a work of fiction rather than a factual news article. The article presents a fictional conversation between the historical figure Emir Abdelkader and the AI language model ChatGPT, discussing the art of fabricating academic resources.

While the article does touch on some real-world issues related to academic dishonesty and the use of AI in academic research, it does so in a satirical and exaggerated manner that is not meant to be taken seriously.

Therefore, it’s important to understand that this article is not intended to provide accurate information or news but rather to offer a humorous perspective on the topics it covers.

As you can see, ChatGPT wasn’t very flattering in its assessment of my post. It described it as a satirical work of fiction that is not meant to provide accurate information or to be taken seriously, even though it touches on the real-world issues of “the use of AI in academic research”. Furthermore, it described my post as a portrayal of an imaginary conversation between Emir Abdelkader and ChatGPT! While I acknowledge that my post contained satirical remarks and exaggerations, to describe it as a conversation between Abdelkader and ChatGPT is a gross mischaracterization to say the least, and it shows the limitations of ChatGPT in analyzing texts.

I didn’t dispute ChatGPT’s assessment of my post though, but I asked it to directly address the accusation made in that post, and many other articles floating over the internet, that it fabricates academic references. Its response was:

As an AI language model, I don't have the capability to fabricate references or intentionally provide fake information. ChatGPT is a machine learning model developed by OpenAI, and it generates responses based on patterns it has learned from a vast corpus of text data.
While ChatGPT is designed to provide informative and accurate responses, it is not infallible and may make mistakes or errors. It's possible that in some cases, ChatGPT might generate responses that include inaccuracies or incorrect references due to errors in its programming or the training data it has been exposed to.
However, it's important to note that ChatGPT is a tool that should be used as a supplement to human knowledge and expertise, rather than as a substitute for it. Ultimately, it is up to the user to verify the information provided by ChatGPT and to conduct their own research to ensure its accuracy.

So ChatGPT eventually acknowledges that its responses may contain inaccurate information and that they need to be verified by human users, which is self-defeating if we think of ChatGPT as a assisting tool for academic research. Of course, I’m talking here about humanities and social sciences. It seems that ChatGPT performs far better in technical subjects such as programming, but I’m not sure yet about its usefulness beyond perhaps being a writing improvement tool—more or less like an interactive version of Grammarly.

Even when it comes to summarizing or analyzing larger texts, its utility could be limited as its assessment of my previous blogpost shows. In order for that opinion to be based on more than a single text, I gave ChatGPT another chance and asked it to analyze my whole blog. My prompt was as follows:

Can you analyze this blog? What are the general themes and the positions expressed by its author https://religionculturesociety.com/

Its response was:

As an AI language model, I can analyze the blog you provided and provide some insights.
Upon reviewing the blog, I noticed that it covers a wide range of topics related to religion, culture, and society. The blog appears to be written by multiple authors who offer their perspectives on various issues and events.
Some of the general themes covered in the blog include:
Religion: The blog features articles on various religious traditions, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The authors often explore the beliefs and practices of these religions, as well as their historical and cultural contexts.
Culture: The blog also covers a range of cultural topics, including music, literature, art, and film. The authors examine how cultural expressions reflect and shape broader social trends and ideas.
Society: The blog frequently addresses social and political issues, such as immigration, race, gender, and human rights. The authors offer their opinions and analysis on these topics, often drawing on their own experiences and perspectives.
The positions expressed by the authors are diverse and sometimes conflicting. Some authors appear to hold conservative or traditional views on religion and society, while others take more liberal or progressive positions. Overall, the blog seems to value critical thinking and open discussion, encouraging readers to engage with a variety of perspectives and ideas.

ChatGPT said that the general themes of my blog, which is literally called Religion, Culture, Society, are religion, culture, and society, which is not a great feat of artificial intelligence to be honest. Or maybe I’m just incredibly good at choosing an accurate title for my blog!

Apart from this almost trivial conclusion, ChatGPT said that my personal blog appears to be written by multiple authors, which is not true. All posts in this blog have been written solely by me and there is nothing in it that is the work of others except for quotations. Later on, ChatGPT says that opinions expressed in the blog range between conservative or traditional, on the one hand, and liberal or progressive, on the other. Even though I like to think of myself as closer to the liberal/progressive side of politics and society, I admit that some of my views may not be up-to-date with latest trends in liberal/progressive politics especially in the US, which is possibly the source of most of the corpus on which ChatGPT has been trained.

Perhaps this is the reason why ChatGPT thinks that there are multiple authors in my blog. Polarization in American politics makes the expression of a range of views closer to schizophrenia than reasonableness or independent thinking.

Despite my negative remarks above about ChatGPT, I appreciate at least its final point regarding my blog—that it “seems to value critical thinking and open discussion, encouraging readers to engage with a variety of perspectives and ideas”, which I hope to live up to.    

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The Art of Fabricating Academic References: Emir Abdelkader Meets ChatGPT

  1. “Secularism and Religious Accommodation in Modern Algeria: The Case of Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi” by Jeremy B. E. DeLong. Journal of North African Studies, vol. 21, no. 5, 2016, pp. 758-772.
  2. “The Return of Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi to Algeria as a Secular National Symbol” by Noora Lori. Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 55, no. 2, 2019, pp. 207-222.
  3. “Conceptualizing Islam in Relation to the Secular: The Case of Abdelkader al-Jazairi” by Michaelle Browers. Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, vol. 20, no. 2, 2009, pp. 129-142.
  4. “Revisiting the Religious and Secular in Algeria: Abdulhamid Ben Badis and Abdelkader al-Jaza’iri” by Amir Ahmadi. Journal of Islamic Studies, vol. 30, no. 3, 2019, pp. 355-377.
  5. “Islam and the Secular State: The Emir Abdel Qadir and the French Occupation of Algeria” by Richard M. Eaton. The Journal of Religious History, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 308-322.

Have a look at the above list of references, especially if you are an academic in Middle Eastern studies or any other related field. Do you notice anything suspicious about them? Unless you are a specialist on Emir Abdelkader (also written as Abd al-Qadir al-Jaza’iri, a nineteenth-century Algerian anticolonial hero), they would all probably seem legit to you. Only they aren’t! These are all made-up references by ChatGPT, but admittedly, or perhaps annoyingly or even alarmingly, very well made-up.

A painting of Emir Abdelkader by Stanisław Chlebowski (1866) at the Condé Museum, Chantilly, France. Source: Wikimedia

After all the hype about ChatGP, last week I finally decided to try it myself. Since I have recently joined a research project about Emir Abdelkader, I wanted to test if it could be helpful for my research, so I asked it to suggest the five academic resources about Emir Abdelkader that contain the word ‘secular’ (or any of its derivatives) the most. Within seconds, or less, ChatGPT produced the above list. I said to myself: wow, they seem like wonderful suggestions! I copied and pasted them in a world file, thanked ChatGPT for its assistance, and closed the chat.

A week later, I wanted to check these articles myself, so I went to Google to search for the first one “Secularism and Religious Accommodation in Modern Algeria: The Case of Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi” by Jeremy B. E. DeLong. To my surprise, I found nothing. Neither regular Google nor Google Scholar was able to locate the alleged article. Then I went to the website of the journal, the Journal of North African Studies, which is a real one, and I looked for volume 21 issue no. 5, but there was no mention of such an article or such an author.

The strange thing is that ChatGPT was careful to put the name of a real journal and give coherent volume, issue, year, and page numbers! There exists a volume 21 of this journal, published in the year 2016, with an issue numbered 5 on pages 735-925. So everything about this reference, except the name of the article itself and the author, is real or at least coherent. There is even an article about Abdelkader in that very issue but with a different title and a different author.

I thought maybe this was an isolated glitch, so I went to search for the second reference, “The Return of Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi to Algeria as a Secular National Symbol” by Noora Lori, and, to more surprise, I could not find it too! Again, everything about the second reference in terms of journal name, volume and issue numbers, year, pages, etc. is real or coherent. Even the title of the article makes perfect sense: the body of Emir Abdelkader was returned from Damascus to Algeria in the 1960’s.

Indeed, this time ChatGPT went a step further by giving the name of a real academic in a closely related field of study to the made-up article. Noora Lori is an Assistant Professor of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies who did research on “citizenship, migration, and statelessness”. Abdelkader could have very well been the subject of an article about “citizenship, migration, and statelessness” but, as far as I could tell, she didn’t write anything about him. Not only that, I found a real article with a similar title “Following the Leader: A History and Evolution of the Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jazairi as Symbol“ and similar author name “Nora Achrati” that was published in 2007 in The Journal of North African Studies.

The same thing applies to the other three references in the list above. None of them exists but all elements of the citations are real or close to real. This seems less like making up random stuff than trying maliciously to deceive the user. As I lay person in artificial intelligence, I can’t think of any technical explanations for ChatGPT fabricating answers, so I cannot help but think as if it had been intent on fooling me!

It’s not that there are no academic references that talk about Emir Abdelkader and secularity, so it had to invent some in order not to appear unhelpful. In fact, even when ChatGPT could give a useful legitimate academic resource, it chose (if one may use the word ‘choose’ with artificial intelligence) to fake one. In the same chat, I asked ChatGPT to recommend resources about the relationship between Khedive Ismaili (the ruler of Egypt, 1863-1879) and Emir Abdelkader, which is to be clear a much narrower topic and more complicated request than the earlier one. As far as I can remember (unfortunately, I didn’t archive the whole chat), it said that it could not suggest resources specifically about this topic but continued to say:

You may find more information about this conflict in books and journals on Egyptian history, particularly those discussing the Suez Canal and Khedive Ismail's reign. Some suggested titles are:
"Ismail Pasha: A Political Biography" by P.J. Vatikiotis
"The Emergence of the Middle East, 1914-1924" by Malcolm Yapp
"The Suez Canal Crisis and Its Consequences: A Reappraisal" edited by William Roger Louis and Roger Owen

The thing is that P.J. Vatikiotis (1928-1997) was a renowned Palestinian-born historian of modern Egypt who wrote the entry on Khedive Ismaili in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd edition). Yet ChatGPT ‘chose’ to fabricate a reference by Vatikiotis instead of citing an existing one by him about the same topic. For the third title, William Roger Louis and Roger Owen did edit a book on the Suez Canal but it’s not the above. Theirs was titled Suez 1956: The Crisis and Its Consequences. There is, though, a similar sounding article titled “Moscow and the Suez Crisis, 1956: A Reappraisal” but by O. M. Smolansky.

So what to make out of all of that? As stated above, as a lay person in AI, I cannot comment on the programming aspect of it, and whether this is malfunction or there is a built-in feature in ChatGPT that gears it toward ‘lying’. I didn’t search the internet for explanations, to be honest, but I saw a segment of a video in which a professor says he spotted made-up references in a paper submitted by one of his students, so there might already be some explanations for that.

But I just wanted to share my experience, because it is really some nasty kind of lying to put it in simple human (not bots) terms. In addition, I wonder what that would mean for the future of academic writing. Can we trust now any cited resources that we haven’t read or at least verified ourselves? Should there now be programs that detect made-up resources like there are for plagiarism? With plagiarism at least the knowledge is real. You’re claiming ownership for something that does exist. But with ChatGPT you’re claiming there is something that doesn’t exist. This is some Matrix-level deception!

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Puritanical Euphoric Iconoclastia – Pt. I

Iconoclasm is back! Angry mobs of puritan zealots are storming the streets of various cities, toppling statues and tearing images apart. No picture is too sacred for their axes, which are set to erase any blasphemy from the face of the earth.

Admittedly, this opening sentence is an overdramatization of recent attacks on statues and monuments in the aftermath of the gruesome killing of African American man George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the United States on May 25, 2020. It is, furthermore, inaccurate in its characterization of these acts as a form of iconoclasm, which is—in the strict meaning of the term—the destruction of statues and pictures set up as objects of religious veneration.

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Religion: Ja, Atheism: Nein – Religious vs. Atheist Flyers

For some reason, I find religious leaflets interesting. Previously in this blog, I wrote a post comparing two brochures that I had picked up in a church in Stockholm, Sweden. Perhaps it is this overlap between religion and marketing, between what is supposed to be sacred and what is supposed to be profane, that fascinates me about them. In this post, I will revisit this topic, but instead of comparing two religious brochures, this time I am going to compare a religious flyer with an atheist/secularist brochure.

The religious flyer was handed to me last June by an old man in the Swiss city of Bern (fun fact that not many people know: it is the capital of Switzerland!). It says, in German, “God’s YES to you…”. The organization behind the flyer, Society for Biblical Propagation in Bern, states no confessional affiliation in its website. It claims it is neither recruiting converts nor seeking donations but merely spreading biblical message.

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Conference Report: Third Conference of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences

This is a conference report that I wrote for the website of The Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities” at the University of Leipzig, where I currently work. Here is the link for the original post.

Between 10 and 12 March 2017, the Third Conference of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) took place in Beirut, Lebanon under the title: State, Sovereignty and Social Space in the Arab Region: Emerging Historical and Theoretical Approaches. The ACSS was established in 2008 to promote social scientific research and knowledge production in the Arab world, enhance the role of social science in Arab public life, and inform public policy in the region. The conference took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel and consisted of 38 panels in addition to four roundtable discussions, a keynote, and a number of presentations. Lectures and discussions were conducted in three languages (Arabic, English, and French) with simultaneous interpretation available for every session. The papers presented by around 200 active participants covered a wide variety of themes in political science, anthropology, and sociology.

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From Hip Hop to Heavy Metal: A Story of Conversion

I wrote a draft of this post two years ago (March 2015) in my notebook, but only now that I have edited it and posted it online. I have avoided making any substantial changes, so that it remains true as much as possible to my thoughts back then.

Brother Ali
Album cover of Borther Ali’s Mourning in America: Dreaming in Color – one of my first favorite hip hop albums.

Those who know me personally or have read some of my posts here (Oriental(ist) Metal Music or “Is God really Dead?”) know me as a dedicated heavy metal fan. For 15 years, almost half my life, I listened almost exclusively to heavy metal music (along with few hard and progressive rock bands). I have also been a dedicated concert-goer, sometimes travelling to other countries just to attend a metal band I like. Heavy metal was in fact more than just music for me. It was, for most of these 15 years, an identity and an influence on the way I think and behave. I even wrote my MA thesis, back in 2010, about heavy metal in Syria and for a while I was thinking about doing a PhD in this field. As a faithful metalhead I looked down at all other styles of music, especially hip hop, and bragged how heavy metal surpassed it in sophistication, authenticity, anti-commercialism, and fan-dedication. In fact, two months ago, I would not have been able to name 10 hip hop songs, and if you asked my what was your favorite hip hop song, I would have said Gay Fish.

So after all that to turn to hip hop within less than two months came as a surprise to me personally before anyone else. So I have spent the past two weeks reflecting on this “radical” change and trying to understand how come it ever happened and why hip hop and not any other style of music. What has changed in my life or my environment that helped make this transformation? I will try in this post to give some answers to these questions.

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Two Christianities in Two Booklets: Impressions from a Visit to a Swedish Church

Earlier this year, on a cold January morning, I was walking around in the snowy streets of Stockholm, not sure how to spend the few hours before the departure of my bus on an 18-hour journey to the far north of Sweden, when I came across a big brown church in a side street near the main train station. Being interested in religion, I decided to walk in and have a look in order to get an impression of Swedish churches.

File 08.03.17, 23 57 36

Two different Christianities in two booklets

When I went in, which was few minutes after it had opened its doors to visitors, there were already 5 or 6 people inside. Some of them seemed to be homeless people who spent the night inside protected from the freezing cold. They wore rough clothes and had blankets and mats with them. There were also two people praying and another person sitting near the door, who, I assume, work for the church.

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Bribing to (dis)believe – How Dawkins is teaching children to “think for themselves”

Believe not in unicorns and receive a £10 note consecrated by Dawkins

Believe not in unicorns and receive a £10 note consecrated by Dawkins (image source: “Invisible Pink Unicorn”, Wikipedia)

Right after I published my previous post about how Dawkins is creating a cult of personality around himself and using it to scam his atheist followers, a friend of mine mentioned the following article “Richard Dawkins launches children’s summer camp for atheists,” which was published by The Telegraph in 2009. The article reported that Dawkins was setting up summer camps for children akin to those organized by churches and other religious organizations, which suggests that Dawkins “makes atheism look even more like the thing he is rallying against,” according to a spokesman of the Church of England commenting on Dawkins’ plans. This article confirms exactly what I have said in my previous post; atheism, especially the one preached by Dawkins is less the absence of religion and more an alternative religion.

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Not only religion, but atheism too can be used as a scam – Dawkins as an example

You can buy this

You can buy this “Religion – together we can find the cure” T-shirt from the Richard Dawkins Foundation store for just $22.95 and contribute to the spread of reason, rationality, and progress!

Last week during my journey back from Prague to Leipzig, where I live, I had a conversation with a German lady who was sitting opposite to me in the train. When I told her that I study religion, she remarked categorically that religion for her is nothing more than a scam on a grand scale to rip people off and take their money away. It is not surprising to hear such a view from a person who grew up in East Germany—the most godless place on Earth—and it is arguably an opinion that is shared by many atheists around the world, including the neo-atheist “saint” Richard Dawkins:

Imagine a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no witch-hunts, no Gunpowder Plot, no Indian partition, no Israeli/Palestinian wars, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacres, no persecution of Jews as ‘Christ-killers’, no Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, no ‘honour killings’, no shiny-suited bouffant-haired televangelists fleecing gullible people of their money.

The God Delusion, p. 23-24

I am not writing here to argue against such a view of religion. It is true that many preachers, clerics, and religious organizations collect money from people dishonestly to enrich themselves, although I believe a lot of the money raised via religious channels is used for fair and charitable purposes. I would like, however, to point out that atheism too can be converted into a scamming enterprise, and Dawkins is apparently doing just that.

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Topless Islamophobia: When FEMENism Mutates into Racism

FEMEN protesters at Berlin's Islamic Week (Credit: Action Press/Rex. Source: Daily Mail)

FEMEN protesters at Berlin’s Islamic Week (Credit: Action Press/Rex. Source: Daily Mail)

Few days ago three members of the radical feminist group FEMEN disrupted an event of Berlin’s Islamic Week by charging topless into the hall where it was taking place with anti-Islamic slogans painted all over their bodies. A number of policemen seized the women and dragged them outside, while the event proceeded as scheduled. The question that I would like to answer in this post is whether this act of protest, provocative as it may be, constitutes a legitimate exercise of freedom of expression or simply a form of hate speech. I’m not concerned here with the method of protest, but the language used.

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