ChatGPT was a little tired this week, to the point of completely losing his mind! Users were entitled to answers without head or tail, the AI even letting itself go into lyrical flights of fancy…
ChatGPT is a truly amazing AI. The chatbot is capable of responding to almost anything, using vocabulary and sentences close to those that a human being could pronounce. The result is truly stunning! No wonder it has become essential for many users! But, as OpenAI itself mentions, “ChatGPT can make errors. Remember to check important information”. Except that, on the day of February 20, the AI completely went into a tailspin – the error stage has largely been passed! Many users reported on Reddit that she gave them mind-blowing answers, mixing languages, launching into lyrical flights of fancy, writing nonsense sentences… And this regardless of whether the requests were made in English, French or Spanish. Numerous screenshots are there to bear witness to this moment of madness. Fortunately, OpenAI quickly caught wind of the problem and appears to have fixed the problem.
ChatGPT: answers without head or tail
What happened is very different from the usual hallucinations, which lead AIs to confidently assert false information or to step out of their role – we remember the slippage of the Bing chatbot (since renamed Copilot), which was going through crises existential and insulted Internet users (see our article). These are meaningless responses to simple requests. The situation is all the stranger because, among the users who encountered this problem, a large proportion of them used GPT-4, OpenAI’s most advanced language model — and, therefore, in principle , the least likely to make mistakes —, through the paid subscription.
So, kefirakk described having the impression of undergoing a “brain attack in text format”, with a mixture of English and Spanish, and tirades “worthy of A Clockwork Orange”, while he only asked the chatbot about the different types of varnish. same for me u/JUBAnonymous, which asked him to think about the hypothesis of a world created only five seconds ago. Result: he was treated to a disjointed paragraph where several languages were mixed. Worse, AI “seemed to invent words in a very pompous way that do not exist in any other language.” As for NoBoysenberry971, he began to make statements worthy of Shakespeare, while the Internet user was learning about the Groq programming language. Let’s finish with the example of the French Sylvain Peyronnetto whom the chatbot started saying that “the most delicious subsumption or periodic deviation – but also axially debilitating of milliseconds or discrete in the ephebe of the quantitative – is the traitor”. For our part, we were not able to reproduce the slippages of ChatGPT on the afternoon of February 21.
Indeed, if there has been no official statement from OpenAI or Sam Altman, including on the company dashboardwhich allows you to know the situation of the different components of the company (ChatGPT, the API, etc.), has recognized an incident in progress. “Unexpected responses from ChatGPT — We are investigating reports of unexpected responses from ChatGPT”, we can read for the night from Tuesday to Wednesday. The company has since added that it “identified” the problem and having remedied it, although the situation remains under surveillance.