A new report from plagiarism detector Copyleaks found that 60% of OpenAI's GPT-3.5 outputs contained some form of plagiarism.
Why it matters: Content creators from authors and songwriters to The New York Times are arguing in court that generative AI trained on copyrighted material ends up spitting out exact copies.
ChatGPT itself doesn't know where it got the info from, so it makes up links and names - it's a language model, not a search engine.
On the other hand, if you manage to find a reputable source and give it relevant metadata, it can format a nice citation for you, saving you time on that instead.
Copilot is GPT under the hood, it just starts with a search step that finds (hopefully) relevant content and then passes that to GPT for summarization.
It depends on how they're using it behind the scenes. Chatbots like ChatGPT can't cite sources, because they are just generating text on the fly. However, some approaches (if links/sources are provided) use an approach called Rag (Retrevial Augmented Generation). This approach uses similarity in search terms to find sources first, then uses the sources to augment/generate its answer.
That being said there are pros and cons to both approaches.