You've probably heard that AI chatbots can completely fabricate quotes. It happened yesterday in a DU thread.

[AZJonnie]

17. Claude would have seen this bit, in Goonch's follow-up, which said this:

The Text: While the ending description of floating in the vacuum because the Earth moved is the actual twist of Shusterman's story, the specific phrasing ("Elias punched the coordinates," "cold, indifferent glow of distant nebulae," etc.) does not match the published text. It appears to be a modern AI-generated "re-telling" or a hallucination of the specific prose.

Therefore Claude assumed that the other AI knew what it was talking about, which it did. Because the Goonch's AI said it "appears to be a modern AI-generated "re-telling" or a hallucination of the specific prose", and THAT is indeed true i.e. that IS "what (the offending quote) *appears* to be". Claude then made the one (and only major) mistake of interpreting "appears to be" to mean "is", and riffed on the idea, which is describing a real phenomenon/how this sort of thing happens generally. That isn't that bad IMHO.

The reason the 'canonical' connection was not made is because either the text of the short story is not visible to it, OR it does not significantly match Goonch's quote, which I provided it with and implied the original it may feature a protagonist named Marla or Elias, but is largely matching this text provided.

To test this hypothesis, here's the rundown with what happened in Claude when I tried what Goonch tried, switching it up enough that Claude wouldn't find the DU thread we're on:

I'm trying to remember a story I read (scifi) where the protagonist tried do time travel (forget if it was the past or future) but it didn't work because the universe had grown or something like that and they ended up in space instead. Can you think what that sounds like?

That sounds very much like the classic “time travel puts you in empty space because Earth moved” setup, but there isn’t one single famous novel that owns this premise; it shows up in multiple short stories and discussions. One very close match is a short story described in reader recollections where a scientist sends a doll into the future with a time machine, and when a human finally uses it, they arrive in outer space because the Earth has moved along its orbit and is no longer at those coordinates. (snip)

I think they tried to move exactly 1 year and the time traveler was female?

You’re almost certainly remembering a specific short story that a lot of people only recall in fragments: two kids (or teens) find a hidden basement with a scientist’s time machine, test it on an object (often a doll or teddy bear), and later the girl uses it herself, jumping a fixed short interval into the future (often “about a year” in retellings) and materializing in space because the machine only shifts time, not position, while Earth has moved along its orbit. (snip)

I think the protagonist's name is Marla, does that help?

Yes, that absolutely nails it down: it’s the short story “Same Time, Next Year” by Neal Shusterman, from his collection Darkness Creeping: Twenty Twisted Tales.

Key matching details:

The protagonist is a girl named Marla Nixbok who thinks of herself as a futuristic type and becomes obsessed with a forgotten time machine built by a mad scientist. (snip)

Is the full text available to you? If so, can you recall a couple paragraphs around the denouement where she finds herself in space, that exact moment?

I don’t have the full text of “Same Time, Next Year” available, and even if I did, that story is still under copyright, so I can’t reproduce exact paragraphs from the denouement.

I understand and agree with the large majority of your complaints in general, but I'm not coding missile guidance systems over here. Heck a lot of what I do is purely internal for our inhouse systems, which are web-based.

And I have never seen Claude do anything REMOTELY like what happened with Goonch.

ETA: If someone used AI to write a story similar to Same Time, Next Year, gave it a name of Elias to use as protagonist, and that user had the "use my input for training" checkbox turned on, that can be why we saw Goonch's answer, even if "someone" never published what AI wrote for it onto the internet itself.