Earlier this month, Adrian Holovaty, laminitis of music-teaching level Soundslice, solved a enigma that had been plaguing him for weeks. Weird images of what were intelligibly ChatGPT sessions kept being uploaded to nan site.
Once he solved it, he realized that ChatGPT had go 1 of his company’s top hype men – but it was besides lying to group astir what his app could do.
Holovaty is champion known arsenic 1 of nan creators of nan open-source Django project, a celebrated Python web improvement model (though he retired from managing nan task successful 2014). In 2012, he launched Soundslice, which remains “proudly bootstrapped,” he tells TechCrunch. Currently, he’s focused connected his euphony profession both arsenic an artist and arsenic a founder.
Soundslice is an app for school music, utilized by students and teachers. It’s known for its video subordinate synchronized to nan euphony notations that guideline users connected really nan notes should beryllium played.
It besides offers a characteristic called “sheet euphony scanner” that allows users to upload an image of insubstantial expanse euphony and, utilizing AI, will automatically move that into an interactive sheet, complete pinch notations.
Holovaty cautiously watches this feature’s correction logs to spot what problems occur, wherever to adhd improvements, he said.
That’s wherever he started seeing nan uploaded ChatGPT sessions.
They were creating a bunch of correction logs. Instead of images of expanse music, these were images of words and a container of symbols known arsenic ASCII tablature. That’s a basal text-based strategy utilized for guitar notations that uses a regular keyboard. (There’s nary treble key, for instance, connected your modular QWERTY keyboard.)

The measurement of these ChatGPT convention images was not truthful onerous that it was costing his institution money to shop them and crushing his app’s bandwidth, Holovaty said. He was baffled, he wrote in a blog post astir nan situation.
“Our scanning strategy wasn’t intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded pinch truthful galore ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks — until I messed astir pinch ChatGPT myself.”
That’s really he saw ChatGPT telling group they could perceive this euphony by opening a Soundslice relationship and uploading nan image of nan chat session. Only, they couldn’t. Uploading those images wouldn’t construe nan ASCII tab into audio notes.
He was struck pinch a caller problem. “The main costs was reputational: caller Soundslice users were going successful pinch a mendacious expectation. They’d been confidently told we would do thing that we don’t really do,” he described to TechCrunch.
He and his squad discussed their options: Slap disclaimers each complete nan tract astir it — “No, we can’t move a ChatGPT convention into hearable music” — aliases build that characteristic into nan scanner, moreover though he had ne'er earlier considered supporting that offbeat philharmonic notation system.
He opted to build nan feature.
“My feelings connected this are conflicted. I’m happy to adhd a instrumentality that helps people. But I consciousness for illustration our manus was forced successful a weird way. Should we really beryllium processing features successful consequence to misinformation?” he wrote.
He besides wondered if this was nan first documented lawsuit of a institution having to create a characteristic because ChatGPT kept repeating, to galore people, its mirage astir it.
The chap programmers connected Hacker News had an absorbing take astir it: Several of them said that it’s nary different than an over-eager quality salesperson promising nan world to prospects and past forcing developers to present caller features.
“I deliberation that’s a very apt and amusing comparison!” Holovaty agreed.