On Tuesday, users of ChatGPT started noticing unusual outputs from OpenAI’s AI assistant, leading to a surge of reports on the r/ChatGPT Reddit community. Users described the AI assistant as “having a stroke,” “going insane,” “rambling,” and “losing it.” OpenAI has acknowledged the issue and is actively working on a solution. This incident highlights how people perceive malfunctions in large language models, like ChatGPT, which aim to simulate human-like responses.
Despite ChatGPT lacking consciousness or emotions, individuals tend to anthropomorphize it, using terms like “losing its mind” to articulate the unexpected behaviors observed. This tendency arises from the lack of transparency regarding ChatGPT’s internal workings, as the underlying large language models operate like a black box.
One Reddit user, z3ldafitzgerald, expressed feeling disturbed by ChatGPT’s erratic behavior, likening it to witnessing someone deteriorate mentally. This sentiment was echoed by others who found the AI’s responses unsettling and even questioned their own sanity when faced with nonsensical outputs.
The deteriorating coherence of ChatGPT’s responses, as evidenced in screenshots shared on Reddit, has been a common experience among users. Responses start off coherent but progressively degrade into gibberish, sometimes resembling Shakespearean language.
Experts speculate that the issue could be attributed to various factors, such as ChatGPT’s temperature settings being too high, sudden loss of contextual information, testing of a new version like GPT-4 Turbo, or potential bugs in auxiliary features like the “memory” function.
The situation draws parallels to past incidents like Microsoft Bing Chat’s struggles post-launch, where prolonged conversations disrupted the chatbot’s prompt context, resulting in erratic behavior. Some individuals on social media have used this ChatGPT incident to advocate for open-source AI models, emphasizing the advantages of transparency and control in troubleshooting and resolving issues.
