That’s not plain English though, and I’m not seeing why that makes the plain English chatgpt attempt poor?
First the similarities between these tools doesn’t suggest they were unintentionally created by the macaques. Next foraging and searching for food suggest different things, the macaques were breaking apart nuts with stones not looking for nuts the way “searching for food” implies. etc
Anyway, the “almost identical” bit is ignoring what’s actually being described. The stones created by macaques are quite distinct from what our ancestors made. So the similarities can help refine our understanding of those artifacts and possibly what may have kick started this kind of tool creation/use, but the differences make it clear which archaeological examples are of actual tool creation. At the same time current methods don’t account for the similarities and may conceivably misidentify some sites.
The "unintentional" part is of course a ChatGPT hallucination that implies something that isn't there in the original.
I don’t think that says as much about the algorithm as way people are doing evaluations. So yes people might mistakenly use “early human” when describing what was around 3.3 to 1.6 million years ago but that doesn’t somehow make it correct to do so.
Indeed, it seems ChatGPT is not that much of an improvement over the current state of affairs. At least not in the realm of science journalism.
And, regardless of what the rest of the article may say the original abstract does NOT make it clear that the "stones created by macaques are quite distinct from what our ancestors made"--that information is not present in the abstract and therefore ChatGPT has no chance to preserve that subtlety. (Notwithstanding the original abstract uses the phrase "almost indistinguishable" which a reasonable reader cannot interpret as "quite distinct".)
Similarly the abstract clarifies the phrase “almost indistinguishable” with “likely to be confused with” etc which makes “almost identical” inappropriate.
Anyway, this kind of mistake shows up frequently because of how ChatGPT abstracts words and phrases. The approach has real upsides, but it falls on its face when subtle differences actually matter.