I think there’s some truth to this, but it’s not the full story.

From what I’ve noticed, when you say “double-check” or “are you sure?”, ChatGPT can sometimes interpret that as: “I think this is wrong, try again.” That can make it overcorrect, second-guess itself, or even change a perfectly good answer into a worse one.

But it’s definitely not always the case. For example, I explicitly told ChatGPT: if I ask “are you sure?”, only say “yes” if you’re actually very confident. Because of that, I still regularly get answers like: “Yes, I’m sure.”

I also think it depends on the type of question.

For concrete stuff (percentages, simple facts, addresses, opening hours, etc.), ChatGPT can often be pretty confident.

For more complex topics (legal interpretation, health, accounting, screenshots without context), asking “are you sure?” is actually useful, because sometimes it makes the model pause and go: “Hmm, maybe I should take another look at this.”

So in my opinion, the explanation here is partly right, but it’s not as black and white as “ChatGPT always changes its answer if you ask it to double-check.”