Jacob Roach / Digital Trends
I’ve witnessed my fair share of downright unhinged AI responses – and one of the most notable instances was when Bing Chat last year declared its desire to be human. But, astonishingly, ChatGPT has generally remained rather sane ever since its initial introduction. However, that tranquility is now changing, as users are flooding social media with countless unhinged and nonsensical responses emanating from the chatbot.
In many reports, ChatGPT simply spits out gibberish. For example, u/Bullroarer_Took took to the ChatGPT subreddit to showcase a response where a series of jargon and proper sentence structure seemingly give the impression of a coherent reply, but upon closer examination, it becomes clear that the AI is simply churning out utter nonsense.
“There are plenty of bizarre responses too,” says u/StackTrace5000. They shared screenshots depicting the chatbot repeating “Happy listening!” countless times, along with a series of sentence fragments that make absolutely no sense. The response reads, “Love piece. Time-lapse. The bookend. Drift and milk. Who’s true. The amber’s.”
On X (formerly Twitter), Sean Mcguire gathered a collection of these screenshots, highlighting similarly unhinged responses. Common themes include ChatGPT vacillating between giving responses in Spanish and sometimes even completely making up words.
“chatgpt is apparently going off the rails right now and no one can explain why,” tweeted Sean Mcguire on February 21, 2024.
It seems that the issues are related to GPT-4. Some users are able to use ChatGPT without encountering any problems, but it’s evident that this is still a widespread issue. The official OpenAI status page states that it has identified the problem with “unexpected responses from ChatGPT” and is currently monitoring the situation. Thankfully, it appears that the issue has now been resolved.
Although ChatGPT can produce human-like responses, these situations serve as a reminder that there is a bundle of code and scraped data lurking behind what we see on the screen. Software glitches can sometimes result in unforeseen responses that might seem unsettling. It’s crucial to keep in mind that this is still a program, and it is just as susceptible to the same issues as any other piece of software.
During our testing of ChatGPT Plus, we were unable to reproduce the unhinged responses that users had shared. It seems that OpenAI has successfully fixed the problem. If you do come across any issues while using the AI, we recommend sharing them on the ChatGPT subreddit or Discord.