Did George Mallory climb Everest in 1924? I asked ChatGPT for an answer

Did George Mallory climb Everest in 1924? I asked ChatGPT for an answer

There’s been a lot of hype about the new chatbot ChatGPT. If it can impersonate a real person, then it occurred to me that I could interview George Mallory and find out if he actually reached the summit of Everest in 1924. So I did, and here’s what happened.

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If Reinhold Messner wasn’t the first person to climb all the 8,000m peaks, who was?

If Reinhold Messner wasn’t the first person to climb all the 8,000m peaks, who was?

There have been rumours in the mountaineering world for a few years now that all the records about ascents of the world’s fourteen 8,000m peaks might need to be rewritten, including whether the great Reinhold Messner was first to climb them all.

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Is the first winter ascent of K2 a turning point for Sherpa mountaineers?

Is the first winter ascent of K2 a turning point for Sherpa mountaineers?

It’s not very often that the ascent of an 8,000m peak makes international news headlines, but earlier this month something rather special happened when a team of 10 Nepali climbers stood on the summit of K2.

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If you climb a peak that collapses in an earthquake, did you still climb it?

If you climb a peak that collapses in an earthquake, did you still climb it?

On 7 August, an earthquake in the Sawtooth Mountains, Idaho, caused a famous rock feature known as Baron Spire, affectionately known as Old Smoothie, to collapse. It also caused a man to shoot a video with the most entertaining commentary ever recorded.

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Review: Touching the Void, on stage in London’s West End

Review: Touching the Void, on stage in London’s West End

There aren’t many characters in Joe Simpson’s book Touching the Void, and the main one spends most of the story entirely alone, contemplating existence as he crawls for three days along a glacier. How on earth were they going to make a stage version of this?

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Nirmal Purja’s ascent of all fourteen 8,000m peaks: why is it controversial?

Nirmal Purja’s ascent of all fourteen 8,000m peaks: why is it controversial?

Last week was one of those weeks when a mountaineering story is so big that it makes it into the popular press. On the face of it, it was a straightforward story of someone smashing a record to smithereens. But if you dig a little deeper, there is another side to it.

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Banished to Room 101: the Inaccessible Pinnacle

Banished to Room 101: the Inaccessible Pinnacle

If you asked a group of UK hill walkers to nominate items for Room 101, some of them might suggest the Inaccessible Pinnacle, a narrow shark’s fin of rock that crowns the summit of Sgurr Dearg, a 978m mountain on the Isle of Skye in north-west Scotland.

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