Technology

It's difficult to conceive the AI manually making this up for no reason, and doing it so consistently for multiple accounts so consistently when asked the same question.

If you understand how LLMs work it's not difficult to conceive. These models are probabilistic and context-driven, and they pick up biases in their training data (which is nearly the entire internet). They learn patterns that exist in the training data, identify identical or similar patterns in the context (prompts and previous responses), and generate a likely completion of those patterns. It is conceivable that a pattern exists on the internet of people requesting information and - more often than not - receiving information that confirms whatever biases are evident in their request. Given that LLMs are known to be excessively sycophantic it's not surprising that when prompted for proof of what the user already suspects to be true it generates exactly what they were expecting.