This is hilarious, ChatGPT caused a huge mess!
AI hallucination randomly fabricated a new product feature, misleading a large number of users to flock to it, ultimately forcing the developer to actually create this fictional feature.
The victim is a music score scanning website, Soundslice, which recently inexplicably received a large number of user uploads of ASCII guitar tablature screenshots, all of which came from ChatGPT.
The website developer was bewildered:
WTF? We don't support scanning ASCII guitar tablature at all???
It wasn't until the developer himself experimented with ChatGPT that he realized, oh, so that's what happened~
After ChatGPT generates ASCII guitar tablature, it automatically recommends people to their website to listen or further create.
However, the website usually scans traditional standard sheet music and simply does not support niche formats like ASCII guitar tablature...
What's even more hilarious is that a large number of users tried the feature, putting the developer in a difficult spot. Not supporting the feature would inevitably disappoint users who came with high expectations, making the website seem inferior.
So, this developer was forced to expedite the development of this feature.
Forced by ChatGPT to Develop a New Feature
The music score scanning website is called Soundslice. Its score scanner feature can digitize music from images or photos, allowing you to listen, edit, and practice.
The website developer stated that they have been continuously improving the system, and part of his job is to monitor error logs to see which images are not being processed satisfactorily.
Over the past few months, he gradually began to notice a strange type of upload content in the error logs.
Not images of traditional sheet music like this:
But rather ChatGPT conversation screenshots like these:
Seeing the screenshot content, the developer was stunned, "What the heck? This is clearly not standard music notation. This is ASCII guitar tablature, and it's a rather rudimentary form of guitar notation."
Their scanning system never had, nor intended to support, this form of notation. So why were they receiving so many ASCII guitar tablature screenshots from ChatGPT?
The developer was puzzled by this for weeks until he tried using ChatGPT himself and discovered that ChatGPT was telling people to sign up for Soundslice, import ASCII guitar tablature, and they would be able to hear audio playback.
Everything made sense then.
The developer was very angry that ChatGPT was completely misleading people, and in the process, it indirectly damaged the website's image and set wrong expectations for their service among users.
The developer was also helpless, what to do? Continuously new users were being given incorrect information about the website. Should they put disclaimers all over the website saying, "Don't believe ChatGPT when it says we support ASCII guitar tablature"?
Ultimately, they decided: Never mind, why not adapt to market demand?
So, they specially developed an ASCII guitar tablature importer. The developer emphasized that this was almost at the very bottom of his "software to write in 2025 forecast." In other words, he hadn't planned to develop this at all before.
They also modified the scanning system's interface text to introduce this new feature to everyone.
Once ASCII guitar tablature is imported into Soundslice, users can play the tablature and edit it. The website will also automatically generate the corresponding standard sheet music, looking like this:
The website specifically states that ASCII guitar tablature is a highly limited format. It does not indicate note durations or rhythm, and sometimes even lacks bar lines. Therefore, they only consider it as a first step to import music into Soundslice, and users may still need to use their editor to organize it.
They then provided detailed explanations of their support for specific aspects of music notation:
It's clear how helpless the developer feels. To his knowledge, this is the first case where ChatGPT mistakenly told people that a certain feature existed, prompting a company to develop that feature.
He himself expressed mixed feelings about this:
I'm happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like we were forced into this under strange circumstances. Should we really develop features in response to misinformation?
Interestingly, the developer could identify ChatGPT screenshots as ASCII guitar tablature at a glance and quickly built the ASCII guitar tablature scanning feature with his team. He himself is a guitarist.
Guitarist & Web Developer
The founder of the Soundslice website, and the person who shared this bizarre incident, is Adrian Holovaty, a Web developer from Chicago and also a musician.
In terms of music, his album works include "Layer Cake" (2025) and "Melodic Guitar Music" (2023).
He is also one of the three co-chairs of the W3C Music Notation Community Group, an organization responsible for developing and maintaining standards related to music notation.
Their work focuses on the MNX format, which they hope will become the encoding format for the next generation of digitized music notation.
The initial purpose of creating the Soundslice website was to enable music lovers to use this tool to turn sheet music into an interactive learning environment for practice, teaching, sharing, and transcription.
The website automatically adapts its music rendering function to devices, features a fully functional web-based music notation editor, and an "optical music recognition" system that can identify notes from photos or PDFs.
In addition, as early as 2005, he also developed chicagocrime.org (website no longer exists), one of the earliest websites to embed Google Maps, which was named one of the year's best ideas by The New York Times; in 2004, he developed a browser extension that inspired the creation of Greasemonkey and "user scripts"; in 2007, he also founded the community news and discussion website EveryBlock, which was later sold.
Even earlier, Adrian Holovaty was a journalist, having worked for The Washington Post, among others.
After he publicized this incident of developing a new feature due to ChatGPT's "lie," it sparked much discussion among netizens.
Interestingly, netizens also had peculiar ideas, suggesting that ChatGPT's hallucinations could precisely be used for development:
I've found this to be one of the super useful ways to program with GPT-4.
Instead of directly telling it how an API works, I let it "guess," for example, by providing example code that needs a new feature. Sometimes, it comes up with better solutions than my original ideas. Then I adjust the API to make its code work.
Conversely, I also give it existing code and ask it what the code does. If it misunderstands, it indicates that my API design is confusing, and it helps pinpoint where the confusion lies.
This actually leverages what neural networks are best at: not outputting precise information, but rather earnestly "making up" content that looks incredibly plausible—the so-called "hallucination." It relies on creativity, not logic.
This is very similar to an old method in human-computer interaction design called the "Wizard of Oz" method. Specifically, it involves a human operator pretending to be an application that has not yet been developed. This method is very useful for discovering new features.
Another netizen found the interesting point of this matter to be:
Launching a new feature is easier than having OpenAI patch ChatGPT to stop pretending this feature exists (I'm not even sure how they would do that; they can't just completely block all mentions of Soundslice, right?).
References: https://www.holovaty.com/writing/chatgpt-fake-feature/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44491071