ChatGPT Goes Temporarily 'Insane' With Unexpected Outputs, Spooking Users

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, ChatGPT users began reporting unexpected outputs from OpenAI's AI assistant, flooding the r/ChatGPT Reddit sub with reports of the AI assistant 'having a stroke,' 'going insane,' 'rambling,' and 'losing it.' OpenAI has acknowledged the problem and is working on a fix, but the experience serves as a high-profile example of how some people perceive malfunctioning large language models, which are designed to mimic humanlike output. ChatGPT is not alive and does not have a mind to lose, but tugging on human metaphors (called 'anthropomorphization') seems to be the easiest way for most people to describe the unexpected outputs they have been seeing from the AI model. They're forced to use those terms because OpenAI doesn't share exactly how ChatGPT works under the hood; the underlying large language models function like a black box.

'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 in response to a post about ChatGPT bugging out. 'It's the first time anything AI related sincerely gave me the creeps.' Some users even began questioning their own sanity. '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?' Read through this series of screenshots below, and you'll see ChatGPT's outputs degrade in unexpected ways.

So far, we've seen experts speculating that the problem could stem from ChatGPT having its temperature set too high (temperature is a property in AI that determines how wildly the LLM deviates from the most probable output), suddenly losing past context (the history of the conversation), or perhaps OpenAI is testing a new version of GPT-4 Turbo (the AI model that powers the subscription version of ChatGPT) that includes unexpected bugs. It could also be a bug in a side feature, such as the recently introduced 'memory' function.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.