I don't know exactly how it works, but using GPT-3 via https://platform.openai.com/playground/, you can have it assign a likeliness score to each word, given all the previous text. That could act as a good confidence score.

Take this with a grain of salt though, I'm far from an expert, and it's been a while since I've played around with that feature.

If it's learning from human behavior, this is nothing new. Our society of late has been rewarding confidence over questioning and that's likely reflected in the ChatGPT training corpus.

Yes, but it has some issues in latest models.

> GPT-4 can also be confidently wrong in its predictions, not taking care to double-check work when it’s likely to make a mistake. Interestingly, the pre-trained model is highly calibrated (its predicted confidence in an answer generally matches the probability of being correct). However, after the post-training process, the calibration is reduced (Figure 8).

pages 10-11: https://cdn.openai.com/papers/gpt-4.pdf

Not an expert myself, but I imagine that generating output that expresses confidence would be distinct from any measure of confidence within the inner workings of GPT itself.