Artificial Intelligence
Why AI Models Give Different Answers to the Same Question
Send ChatGPT the same message twice within five minutes and you will likely receive two distinct responses. The wording differs, the examples change, sometimes the conclusions shift. This is not a bug, and it is not the model lying — it is the intended consequence of probabilistic sampling, a deliberate design choice that trades consistency for coverage. Understanding why requires a look at how language models generate text one token at a time.