Writing a Pub Quiz? DO NOT Use ChatGPT

The Temptation Is Real

You've got a quiz night in two days. You're staring at a blank document. You think: I'll just ask ChatGPT to write me 50 questions.

We get it. But before you do, read this. Because what comes back might just ruin your quiz night — and your reputation as a host.

What ChatGPT Actually Produces (Real-World Examples)

We tested ChatGPT with common pub quiz prompts so you don't have to. Here's what it spat out — and why each one is a problem.

❌ Example 1: The Outdated Answer

Q: Who is the current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom?
A (ChatGPT): Rishi Sunak

Why it's a problem: ChatGPT has a knowledge cutoff. It doesn't know what happened last week, last month, or even last year. If you use this question without checking, you could be confidently wrong in front of 60 people.

❌ Example 2: The Hallucinated Fact

Q: What year did the Eiffel Tower open to the public?
A (ChatGPT): 1889 ✓ ... but then it adds: "It was originally painted white before being changed to its iconic brown colour in 1968."

Why it's a problem: The Eiffel Tower has never been white. It was originally reddish-brown. ChatGPT confidently invented a fact and wrapped it in a real one. That's the dangerous kind of wrong.

❌ Example 3: The Ambiguous Question

Q: Which country has the most lakes?
A (ChatGPT): Canada

Why it's a problem: This is technically debated depending on how you define a "lake" and which data source you use. At a quiz night, half the room will shout "Canada!", someone will shout "Finland!", and you'll spend five minutes arguing. A good quiz question has one clear, undisputed answer.

❌ Example 4: The Wrong Answer Presented Confidently

Q: What is the capital of Australia?
A (ChatGPT): Sydney

Why it's a problem: It's Canberra. This is one of the most famous trick questions in pub quizzes — and ChatGPT gets it wrong. If you'd used this without checking, you'd have marked correct answers as wrong and handed out points to people who were actually incorrect.

❌ Example 5: The Boring, Generic Round

Q: What is the chemical symbol for gold?
Q: Who painted the Mona Lisa?
Q: What is the largest planet in the solar system?

Why it's a problem: These aren't bad questions — they're just every pub quiz from 2003. ChatGPT defaults to the most common, most searched, most generic questions on the internet. Your audience has heard them a hundred times. There's no surprise, no delight, no "ooh, I didn't know that!" moment.

Why ChatGPT Gets Pub Quiz Questions Wrong

It's not that AI is stupid — it's that it's optimised for the wrong thing. ChatGPT is trained to produce text that sounds correct and confident. Pub quiz questions need to be correct, specific, and entertaining. Those are very different goals.

Here's what AI consistently gets wrong:

• Outdated information — it doesn't know recent events
• Hallucinated details — it invents plausible-sounding facts
• Ambiguous answers — it doesn't flag when a question has multiple defensible answers
• No sense of difficulty curve — rounds feel flat, not structured
• Zero local knowledge — it can't write a round about your town, your regulars, or this week's news
• No personality — the questions feel like a school exam, not a night out

What a Great Pub Quiz Actually Needs

A brilliant quiz round isn't just a list of facts. It needs:

• A clear theme with a satisfying arc
• A mix of easy, medium, and hard questions
• At least one question that makes people groan and laugh at the same time
• Answers that are unambiguous and verifiable
• A bit of personality from the host

That's hard to get from a language model that's essentially averaging the entire internet.

The Better Alternative

At quiz'd, every pack is written by humans who actually run pub quizzes. Questions are fact-checked, tested for ambiguity, and structured to give your night a proper flow — from warm-up rounds to nail-biting finishers.

You get a ready-made quiz that works straight out of the box, with no fact-checking required, no awkward disputes, and no embarrassing moments when someone pulls out their phone and proves you wrong.

👉 Browse our ready-made quiz packs — and leave the AI to write someone else's terrible quiz.

The Bottom Line

ChatGPT is a useful tool for many things. Writing pub quiz questions isn't one of them — at least not without a serious amount of checking, editing, and second-guessing. And at that point, you might as well have written it yourself.

Save yourself the stress. Use a pack that's already been done properly.