Today's best AI models often fail at simply copying text back exactly

Leading AI chat models make mistakes when asked to repeat a piece of text word for word. On long, repetitive text, five top models copied it correctly less than half the time.

Why it matters

Copying is not a clever task, but software built on AI does it constantly. A program might be asked to move numbers from your form into a table, or settings from one file into another. If the AI silently changes one character, the mistake is easy to miss and hard to trace. The researchers also show a possible fix, but they only tested it on small models they built themselves, so it is not yet proven in the biggest systems.

Who's behind it: Haodong Wen, Yiran Zhang, Yingfa Chen and Kaifeng Lyu, Tsinghua University.

Summary by the Lemma AI · how we grade

Read the original paper (arxiv.org)