ChatGPT goes "absolutely nuts" for hours and no one can explain why

By lauraharris // 2024-02-27

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ChatGPT, OpenAI's popular artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, went "absolutely nuts" on Feb. 20 – and nobody can explain why. According to ChatGPT users across social media platforms like Reddit and X, the popular artificial intelligence chatbot provided lengthy and seemingly incoherent answers to basic queries. Users experienced a peculiar malfunction when the chatbot started displaying erratic behavior and generating responses ranging from nonsensical to downright Shakespearean. (Related: ChatGPT forced to admit that Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner is a MAN after all.) "Has ChatGPT gone temporarily insane? I was talking to it about Groq, and it started doing Shakespearean-style rants," one user asked on the ChatGPT subreddit. "It’s lost its mind," another user wrote. "I asked it for a concise, one-sentence summary of a paragraph and it gave me a [Victorian]-era epic to rival Beowulf, with nigh incomprehensible purple prose. It’s like someone just threw a thesaurus at it and said, 'Use every word in this book.'" In one instance, ChatGPT told one user: "Let's keep the line as if AI is in the room." The user who initiated the conversation about coding shared the response on Reddit, and commented: "Reading this at 2 a.m. is scary." Meanwhile, ChatGPT users on X also expressed their frustration. "ChatGPT just broke. Constantly getting garbage in my responses. Starts off okay, but then it gets drunk." Another user shared an odd encounter, stating that when they asked the chatbot for recommendations on a Bill Evans Trio vinyl, it responded with a loop of "Happy listening!" – an unexpected and unrelated answer. The glitch manifested differently. Most users experienced non-sequiturs, incorrect answers and repetitive phrases throughout the night. Some users wondered if the language model had temporarily collapsed, while others jokingly speculated about the chatbot achieving sentience.

Gemini and Gab AI also go off the rails

ChatGPT wasn't the only AI chatbot to go "off the rails" during this time. Gab AI and Google's Gemini AI were also reportedly experiencing malfunctions. According to several reports, when Gemini users asked the chatbot to generate images, it refused to place white people in them. Instead, it transformed historically white figures into multiracial characters. The controversy, which happened just two weeks after the launch of Gemini, led to widespread outrage. This, in turn, prompted Google to issue an apology and temporarily stop the people-creating feature of its AI image generator to rectify the issue. Meanwhile, the conservative-leaning social media platform Gab introduced AI chatbot versions of Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, both of which denied the existence of the Holocaust. The technology behind Gab's chatbots remains unclear, but CEO Andrew Torba claimed their user base is growing by 20,000 people a day. Gab AI, along with Grok, is an alternative to "woke" AI chatbots like Gemini and ChatGPT. These incidents have not spared any political affiliations, with both conservatives and liberals expressing dissatisfaction with the AI chatbots. OpenAI, which is widely embraced as an AI tool for businesses, showcased the unreliability of its product, leading to renewed concerns about the rapid pace of AI development. In response, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman had no choice but to acknowledge the nascent stage of alignment technology.

"Alignment – controlling a model’s behavior and values – is still a pretty young discipline. That said, these public outcries [are] important for spurring us to solve these problems and develop better alignment tech," he tweeted.

Learn more about artificial intelligence programs like ChatGPT at Computing.news. Watch Brother Nathanael Kapner's warning about the dangers of ChatGPT below. This video is from the jonastheprophet channel on Brighteon.com.

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Gemini and Gab AI also go off the rails

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