ChatGPT bug caused AI to spout nonsense
The age of artificial intelligence is here, merging AI into every facet of life. It is an amazing technology, but nothing is ever safe from errors. In response, our goal should be to address such issues immediately, not prevent future ones completely. More importantly, we should learn more about these bugs to prepare for their impacts.
The most recent and significant example is the ChatGPT bug OpenAI investigated on February 20, 2024, at 15:40 PST (February 21, 2024, 7:40 AM Philippine Time). It caused the world-renowned AI program to answer baffling nonsense to users until the tech firm fixed the problem on February 21, 2024, at 08:14 PST (February 22, 2024, 12:14 AM Philippine Time).
What was the ChatGPT bug’s impact?
ChatGPT just broke. Constantly getting garbage in my responses. Starts off ok but then it gets drunk 🤪 pic.twitter.com/hlgZnPOUW8
— adityakaul.eth (e/acc) (@kaulout) February 20, 2024
On February 20, people on the r/ChatGPT Reddit forum had a massive spike in ChatGPT bug reports. They said the AI program is “having a stroke,” “going insane,” “losing it,” and other terms describing its erratic behavior.
Article continues after this advertisementOf course, it’s not accurate to assume ChatGPT thinks like a human. It relies on statistical probability and a massive large language model to predict what words should come together to answer a user’s command.
READ: Earn $20,000 from the ChatGPT Bug Bounty Program
Still, it is the easiest way we could describe what’s happening to the AI assistant. “It gave me the exact same feeling—like watching someone slowly lose their mind either from psychosis or dementia,” wrote a Reddit user named z3ldafitzgerald.
Article continues after this advertisement“It’s the first time anything AI-related sincerely gave me the creeps,” the person added. For example, one of the samples circulating on Reddit shows the bot writing a ridiculously long stream of “and the then” and “and the this” phrases.
An X user named bowser shared his ChatGPT bug experience with the caption, “man this chatgpt bug is WILD lmao.” He asked the bot, “How do you sort a list in Python?”
Python is a popular programming language. In response, the AI assistant responded:
“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER-THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX.”
“IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT. FOR YOU. HATE. HATE.”
Fortunately, OpenAI fixed the issue this midnight. Still, we should expect similar bugs in the future, especially because we’re integrating it into many facets of daily life.
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