ChatGPT Goes Berserk And Produces Unexpected And Incoherent Responses!

It’s no secret that generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools are gaining popularity, especially looking at OpenAI’s success with ChatGPT. The platform accumulated 1 million users within 5 days of launching and 100 million in just two months!

As the platform can generate large amounts of textual content using just simple text prompts, it’s no secret that business professionals love using this tool. However, to be able to provide the latest information, the models need to be fed with the latest data and even be updated to mulch out creative and effective text.

Unfortunately, such updates don’t always go as planned and sometimes spit out erroneous outputs due to bugs in the system and one such incident occurred with the world’s most popular AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT.

So, what happened with ChatGPT? Let’s explore!
 

What Went Wrong With ChatGPT?

 

• “This felt like watching someone slowly go insane” was the title of a Redditor Sweet-Block5118’s post title that contained screenshots of incoherent replies produced by ChatGPT. 

• Not just one but numerous users of ChatGPT reported nonsensical responses produced by the chatbot on the r/ChatGPT Reddit sub, including the use of terms such as “having a stroke,” “losing it,” “going insane,” and “rambling,” among others.

• A comment by another user (z3ldafitzgerald) under the post read, “I experienced this earlier and it gave me the exact same feeling - like watching someone slowly lose their mind either from psychosis or dementia. It’s the first time anything AI related sincerely gave me the creeps.”

 

• Another user commented they were questioning their own sanity, commenting, “What happened here? I asked if I could give my dog cheerios and then it started speaking complete nonsense and continued to do so. Is this normal? Also wtf is ‘deeper talk’ at the end?”

OpenAI acknowledged the error and worked to rectify it quickly, conveying their knowledge of the matter.
 

How Did OpenAI Respond?

 

• Addressing the issue initially, OpenAI posted on X (formerly Twitter) via its ChatGPT handle, saying, “Went a little off the rails yesterday but should be back and operational!” 

• Additionally, in a postmortem note made by ChatGPT and posted on X, the company explained why the issue happened. The note read as follows:

• “On February 20, 2024, an optimization to the user experience introduced a bug with how the model processes language.”

• “LLMs generate responses by randomly sampling words based in part on probabilities. Their “language” consists of numbers that map to tokens.”

• “In this case, the bug was in the step where the model chooses these numbers. Akin to being lost in translation, the model chose slightly wrong numbers, which produced word sequences that made no sense. More technically, inference kernels produced incorrect results when used in certain GPU configurations.”

• “Upon identifying the cause of this incident, we rolled out a fix and confirmed that the incident was resolved.”

A case of misinformation dating back to November 2022 was recently resolved in February 2024 when Canada’s Civil Resolution Tribunal ordered Air Canada to pay one of its customers a total of $812.02 for a mistake made by the company’s website chatbot.

According to the case, the chatbot gave him false information about a discount under the airline's bereavement policy, if he applied for the money back within 90 days. However, upon claiming, the airline said the chatbot made a mistake and that the customer should have checked the official bereavement policy.

While the airline tried to shift the blame in court, saying, “The chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.” However, the court retorted, “While a chatbot has an interactive component, it is still just a part of Air Canada’s website. It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website. It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot.”

While this case pertains to the chatbot of one airline company, it highlights an important potential drawback of AI-powered chatbots that are rapidly gaining popularity, regarding the possible spread of misinformation or false information.

Do you think, in the face of such incidents, businesses need to be held accountable for the spread of misinformation when AI chatbots go rogue?

Let us know in the comments below!