Earlier this month, Adrian Holovaty, founding father of music-teaching platform Soundslice, solved a thriller that had been plaguing him for weeks. Bizarre photographs of what had been clearly ChatGPT classes stored being uploaded to the positioning.
As soon as he solved it, he realized that ChatGPT had turn out to be considered one of his firm’s best hype males – but it surely was additionally mendacity to individuals about what his app might do.
Holovaty is finest often known as one of many creators of the open-source Django challenge, a well-liked Python net improvement framework (although he retired from managing the challenge in 2014). In 2012, he launched Soundslice, which stays “proudly bootstrapped,” he tells TechCrunch. At present, he’s centered on his music profession each as an artist and as a founder.
Soundslice is an app for educating music, utilized by college students and lecturers. It’s recognized for its video participant synchronized to the music notations that information customers on how the notes needs to be performed.
It additionally affords a function referred to as “sheet music scanner” that permits customers to add a picture of paper sheet music and, utilizing AI, will robotically flip that into an interactive sheet, full with notations.
Holovaty fastidiously watches this function’s error logs to see what issues happen, the place so as to add enhancements, he stated.
That’s the place he began seeing the uploaded ChatGPT classes.
They had been making a bunch of error logs. As a substitute of photographs of sheet music, these had been photographs of phrases and a field of symbols often known as ASCII tablature. That’s a primary text-based system used for guitar notations that makes use of a daily keyboard. (There’s no treble key, as an illustration, in your normal QWERTY keyboard.)
The amount of those ChatGPT session photographs was not so onerous that it was costing his firm cash to retailer them and crushing his app’s bandwidth, Holovaty stated. He was baffled, he wrote in a weblog publish concerning the state of affairs.
“Our scanning system wasn’t intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks — until I messed around with ChatGPT myself.”
That’s how he noticed ChatGPT telling individuals they may hear this music by opening a Soundslice account and importing the picture of the chat session. Solely, they couldn’t. Importing these photographs wouldn’t translate the ASCII tab into audio notes.
He was struck with a brand new drawback. “The main cost was reputational: new Soundslice users were going in with a false expectation. They’d been confidently told we would do something that we don’t actually do,” he described to TechCrunch.
He and his workforce mentioned their choices: Slap disclaimers all around the web site about it — “No, we can’t turn a ChatGPT session into hearable music” — or construct that function into the scanner, though he had by no means earlier than thought of supporting that offbeat musical notation system.
He opted to construct the function.
“My feelings on this are conflicted. I’m happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?” he wrote.
He additionally puzzled if this was the primary documented case of an organization having to develop a function as a result of ChatGPT stored repeating, to many individuals, its hallucination about it.
The man programmers on Hacker Information had an fascinating take about it: A number of of them stated that it’s no completely different than an over-eager human salesperson promising the world to prospects after which forcing builders to ship new options.
“I think that’s a very apt and amusing comparison!” Holovaty agreed.
