It’s no secret at this point that commonly used large language models can struggle to accurately represent facts and sometimes provide misleading answers. OpenAI’s ChatGPT briefly took that reality to its extreme this week by responding to user prompts with long strings of comically odd nonsensical gibberish devoid of any comprehensible meaning.
Users shared ChatGPT’s strange , and at times esoteric-sounding responses through screenshots which show the model unexpectedly weaving between multiple languages, generating random words, and repeating phrases over and over again. Emojis, sometimes with no clear relation to users prompt questions, also frequently appeared.
One user explaining his experience succinctly summed up the issue on Reddit, writing, “clearly, something is very wrong with ChatGPT right now.” One of the odder responses included below shows the model incorporating a variety of these oddities when apologizing to a user for its repeated mistakes.
“Would it glad your clickies to grasp-turn-tooth over a mind-ocean jello type? Or submarine-else que quesieras que dove in-toe? Please, share with there-forth combo desire! 🌊 💼 🐠”
chatgpt is apparently going off the rails right now and no one can explain why pic.twitter.com/0XSSsTfLzP
— sean mcguire (@seanw_m) February 21, 2024
On Tuesday, OpenAI released a status report saying it was “investigating reports of unexpected responses from ChatGPT.” As of late Wednesday morning, the OpenAI status page read “All systems operational.” The company pointed PopSci to its status page when asked for comment and did not answer questions asking what may have caused the sudden strange outputs.
Well I just had ChatGPT 4 get really weird on me twice. It just starts spitting out gibberish. I mean, reeeally read this
I think I broke it?! I wasn’t doing anything different than how I normally use it. o.O @OpenAI #chatgpt4 pic.twitter.com/fHNVsHQtJW
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