Years ago, I had an argument with a friend about the colors of the Yoshis in Super Mario World. I claimed them to be green, red, yellow, and blue; my friend argued that the colors were green, red, yellow, and purple. (His argument, which is admittedly challenging to refute, is, "Look at it.") We've had this argument continually for over a decade.
Like everyone else with a pulse, I've been playing around with ChatGPT. I decided to see how it would do in settling this dispute. Here was its response:
My immediate response, based on my experience, was that nearly none of this is true. But, I hesitated because of the claim that there are different versions. After some searching, I still have no evidence that this is true, but I have seen some strange things that still leave me with a bit of doubt, such as this Quora post in which someone again asserts there to be six Yoshis (albeit a different six than what ChatGPT told me).
My question is: Is there any truth to either the claim of six Yoshis or of some alternate versions? Certainly, there are localized versions in different languages, but I'm asking if there's a more profound version difference of some sort that I have missed.
I imagine this answer comes from a conflation of SMW with some entirely different game (SMW2: Yoshi's Island, perhaps? Or Yoshi's Story?) but I can't seem to find a perfect match to support that assertion. I think this is an important example about the inherent limitations of AI language models, but I'd like to be just a bit more confident that I have the facts right before using that example.
