Microsoft seems to have come up with a good middle road with their temperature setting in bing chat. You can pick between “factual” (mostly, still makes up shit but at least tries not to), “medium” for a bit more creative results, and “creative” for the less factual and more creative operations.

You can’t prevent the random bullshit AI generates because it doesn’t understand concepts behind the words it’s generating. It’s picking the most likely continuations of words and sentences based on some tuning and it’s bound to get that stuff wrong.

For some of the more unhinged AI issues (like Bing Chat accusing the user of gaslighting it, lying to it, etc.) can be fixed with tuning and post processing so the user never sees the AI go off the rails, ur when it comes to factual verification there’s very little you can do.

Perhaps scientists will be able to solve this problem in the next generation of language models, but that next generation should be based on more than “the same concept but we increased the number of parameters and input text”.