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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists
- ahstilde 1y agoThis is called product-channel fit. It's great the writer recognized how to capture the demand from a new acquisition channel.
- toss1 1y agoExactly! It is definitely a weird new way of discovering a market need or opportunity. Yet it actually makes a lot of sense this would happen since one of the main strengths of LLMs is to 'see' patterns in large masses of data, and often, those patterns would not have yet been noticed by humans. And in this case, OP didn't have to take ChatGPT's word for the existence of the pattern, it showed up on their (digital) doorstep in the form of people taking action based on ChatGPT's incorrect information. So, pattern noticed and surfaced by an LLM as a hallucination, people take action on the "info", nonzero market demand validated, vendor adds feature. Unless the phantom feature is very costly to implement, seems like the right response.
- Gregaros 1y ago100%. Not sure why you’re downvoted here, there’s nothing controversial here even if you disagree with the framing. I would go on to say that thisminteraction between ‘holes’ exposed by LLM expectations _and_ demonstrated museerbase interest _and_ expert input (by the devs’ decision to implement changes) is an ideal outcome that would not have occurred if each of the pieces were not in place to facilitate these interactions, and there’s probably something here to learn from and expand on in the age of LLMs altering user experiences.
- bredren 1y agoIs related to solutions engineering, which IIUC focuses on customizations / adapters / data wrangling for individual (larger) customers?
- viccis 1y agoYeah my main thought was that ChatGPT is now automating what sales people always do at the companies I've worked at, which is to hone in on what a prospective customer wants, confidently tell them we have it (or will have it next quarter), and then come to us and tell us we need to have it ready for a POV.
- bravesoul2 1y agoIn this case the channel tells you exactly what to build and isn't lying to you (modulo: will these become paying customers?)
- homeless_engi 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kelseyfrog 1y ago> Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation? Creating the feature means it's no longer misinformation. The bigger issue isn't that ChatGPT produces misinformation - it's that it takes less effort to update reality to match ChatGPT than it takes to update ChatGPT to match reality. Expect to see even more of this as we match toward accepting ChatGPT's reality over other sources.
- mnw21cam 1y agoI'd prefer to think about this more along the lines of developing a feature that someone is already providing advertising for.
- pmontra 1y agoHow many times did a salesman sell features that didn't exist yet? If a feature has enough customers to pay for itself, develop it.
- xp84 1y agoThis seems like such a negative framing. LLMs are (~approximately) predictors of what's either logical or at least probable. For areas where what's probable is wrong and also harmful, I don't think anybody is motivated to "update reality" as some kind of general rule.
- SunkBellySamuel 1y agoTrue anti-luddite behavior
- amelius 1y agoCan this sheet-music scanner also expand works so they don't contain loops, essentially removing all repeat-signs?
- shhsshs 1y ago"Repeats" may be the term you're looking for. That would be interesting, however in some pieces it could make the overall document MUCH longer. It would be similar to loop unrolling.
- amelius 1y agoI don't care if the document becomes longer. Finding repeat signs is driving me nuts :)
- Sharlin 1y agoWhy?
- bentoner 1y agoOne reason is that repeats make it harder to use page-turner pedals.
- Koffiepoeder 1y agoIt can be hard during live performances, because it can incur large jumps in the sheet music which can be annoying to follow. Not a problem if you learned the pieces by heart or have a pageturner, but this is not always feasible or the case.
- adrianh 1y agoYes, that's a Soundslice feature called "Expand repeats," and you can read about it here: https://www.soundslice.com/help/en/player/advanced/17/expanding-repeats/ https://www.soundslice.com/help/en/player/advanced/17/expand... That's available for any music in Soundslice, not just music that was created via our scanning feature.
- lpzimm 1y agoPretty goofy but I wonder if LLM code editors could start tallying which methods are hallucinated most often by library. A bad LSP setup would create a lot of noise though.
- simonw 1y agoI find it amusing that it's easier to ship a new feature than to get OpenAI to patch ChatGPT to stop pretending that feature exists (not sure how they would even do that, beyond blocking all mentions of SoundSlice entirely.)
- PeterStuer 1y agoCompanies pay good money to panels of potential customers to hear their needs and wants. This is free market research!
- bobbylox 1y agoBut they wouldn't have wanted this particular thing if the AI hadn't told them to.
- PeterStuer 1y agoYou mean they didn't want infinite free personalized guitar practice lessons they can play along with? Clearly the users are already using ChatGPT for generating some guitar practice, as it is basically infinite free personalized lessons. For practicing they do want to be able hear it to play along at variable speed, maybe create slight variations etc. Soundslice is a service that does exactly that. Except that before people used to have sheet music as the source. I know way back when I had guitar aspirations, people exchanged binders of photocopied sheet music. Now they could have asked ChatGPT to output an svg of the thing as sheet music (it does, I tested). Soundslice could have done this behind the scenes as a half hour quick and dirty fix while developing a better and more cost effective alternative. Look, if at the turn of the century you were a blacksmith living of changing horseshoes, and you suddenly have people mistakenly showing up for a tire change on their car, are you going to blame the villagers that keep sending them your way, or open a tire change service? We know who came out on top.
- hnlmorg 1y agoI think the benefit of their approach isn’t that it’s easier, it’s that they still capitalise on ChatGPTs results. Your solution is the equivalent of asking Google to completely delist you because one page you dont want ended up on Googles search results.
- yieldcrv 1y ago> We ended up deciding: what the heck, we might as well meet the market demand. this is my general philosophy and, in my case, this is why I deploy things on blockchains so many people keep wondering about whether there will ever be some mythical unfalsifiable to define “mainstream” use case, and ignoring that crypto natives just … exist. and have problems they will pay (a lot) to solve. to the author’s burning question about whether any other company has done this. I would say yes. I’ve discovered services recommended by ChatGPT and other LLMs that didnt do what was described of them, and they subsequently tweaked it once they figured out there was new demand
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- philk10 1y agoI have fun asking Chatbots how to clear the chat and seeing how many refer to non-existent buttons or menu options
- nosioptar 1y agoI tried asking chat bots about a car problem with a tailgate. They all told me to look for a manual tailgate release. When I responded asking if that model actually had a manual release, they all responded with no, and then some more info suggesting I look for the manual release. None even got close to a useful answer.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y agoThe internet doesn't effectively capture detailed knowledge of may aspects of our real world. LLMs have blind spots in those domains because they have no source of knowledge to draw from.
- mnw21cam 1y agoPrior to buying a used car, I asked ChatGPT which side of the steering wheel the indicator control would be. It was (thankfully) wrong and I didn't have to retrain myself.
- deweller 1y agoThis is an interesting example of an AI system effecting a change in the physical world. Some people express concerns about AGI creating swarms of robots to conquer the earth and make humans do its bidding. I think market forces are a much more straightforward tool that AI systems will use to shape the world.
- ACCount36 1y agoAnd this is why "just don't give AI access to anything dangerous" is delusional. One of the most dangerous systems an AI can reach and exploit is a human being.
- insapio 1y ago"A Latent Space Outside of Time" > Correct feature almost exists > Creator profile: analytical, perceptive, responsive; > Feature within product scope, creator ability > Induce demand > await "That doesn't work" => "Thanks!" > update memory
- aaron695 1y agoWhy would anyone think this is a bad thing as the article hints? "We’ve got a steady stream of new users" and it seems like a simple feature to implement. This is the exact chaos AI brings that's wonderful. Forcing us to evolve in ways we didn't think of. I can think of a dozen reasons why this might be bad, but I see no reason why they have more weight than the positive here. Take the positive side of this unknown and run with it. We have decades more of AI coming up, Debbie Downers will be left behind in the ditch.
- zitterbewegung 1y agoIf you build on LLMs you can have unknown features. I was going to add an automatic translation feature to my natural language network scanner at http://www.securday.com http://www.securday.com but apparently using the ChatGPT 4.1 does automatic translation so I didn’t have to add it.
- adamgordonbell 1y agoWe (others at company, not me) hit this problem, and not with chatgpt but with our own AI chatbot that was doing RAG on our docs. It was occasionally hallucinating a flag that didn't exist. So it was considered as product feedback. Maybe that exact flag wasn't needed, but something was missing and so the LLM hallucinated what it saw as an intuitive option.
- toomanyrichies 1y agoThis feels like a dangerously slippery slope. Once you start building features based on ChatGPT hallucinations, where do you draw the line? What happens when you build the endpoint in response to the hallucination, and then the LLM starts hallucinating new params / headers for the new endpoint? - Do you keep bolting on new updates to match these hallucinations, potentially breaking existing behavior? - Or do you resign yourself to following whatever spec the AI gods invent next? - And what if different LLMs hallucinate conflicting behavior for the same endpoint? I don’t have a great solution, but a few options come to mind: 1. Implement the hallucinated endpoint and return a 200 OK or 202 Accepted, but include an X-Warning header like "X-Warning: The endpoint you used was built in response to ChatGPT hallucinations. Always double-check an LLM's advice on building against 3rd-party APIs with the API docs themselves. Refer to https://api.example.com/docs https://api.example.com/docs for our docs. We reserve the right to change our approach to building against LLM hallucinations in the future." Most consumers won’t notice the header, but it’s a low-friction way to correct false assumptions while still supporting the request. 2. Fail loudly: Respond with 404 Not Found or 501 Not Implemented, and include a JSON body explaining that the endpoint never existed and may have been incorrectly inferred by an LLM. This is less friendly but more likely to get the developer’s attention. Normally I'd say that good API versioning would prevent this, but it feels like that all goes out the window unless an LLM user thinks to double-check what the LLM tells them against actual docs. And if that had happened, it seems like they wouldn't have built against a hallucinated endpoint in the first place. It’s frustrating that teams now have to reshape their product roadmap around misinformation from language models. It feels like there’s real potential here for long-term erosion of product boundaries and spec integrity. EDIT: for the down-voters, if you've got actual qualms with the technical aspects of the above, I'd love to hear them and am open to learning if / how I'm wrong. I want to be a better engineer!
- tempestn 1y agoTo me it seems like you're looking at this from a very narrow technical perspective rather than a human- and business-oriented one. In this case ChatGPT is effectively providing them free marketing for a feature that does not yet exist, but that could exist and would be useful. It makes business sense for them to build it, and it would also help people. That doesn't mean they need to build exactly what ChatGPT envisioned—as mentioned in the post, they updated their copy to explain to users how it works; they don't have to follow what ChatGPT imagines exactly. Nor do they need to slavishly update what they've built if ChatGPT's imaginings change. Also, it's not like ChatGPT or users are directly querying their API. They're submitting images through the Soundslice website. The images just aren't of the sort that was previously expected.
- josefritzishere 1y agoThat's a very constructive way of responding to AI being hot trash.
- nottorp 1y agoWell, the OP reviewed the "AI" output, deemed it useful and only then implemented it. This is generally how you work with LLMs.
- AIPedant 1y agoI don't think they deemed it "useful": We’ve never supported ASCII tab; ChatGPT was outright lying to people. And making us look bad in the process, setting false expectations about our service.... We ended up deciding: what the heck, we might as well meet the market demand. [...] My feelings on this are conflicted. I’m happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation? The feature seems pretty useless for practicing guitar since ASCII tablature usually doesn't include the rhythm: it is a bit shady to present the music as faithfully representing the tab, especially since only beginner guitarists would ask ChatGPT for help - they might not realize the rhythm is wrong. If ChatGPT didn't "force their hand" I doubt they would have included a misleading and useless feature.
- zzo38computer 1y agoASCII tablature is not something I use and not something I know much about, but if you are correct then I think that might be a good reason to deliberately avoid such a feature.
- inglor_cz 1y agoI am a bit conflicted about this story, because this was a case when the hallucination is useful. Amateur musicians often lack just one or two features in the program they use, and the devs won't respond to their pleas. Adding support for guitar tabs has made OP's product almost certainly more versatile and useful for a larger set of people. Which, IMHO, is a good thing. But I also get the resentment of "a darn stupid robot made me do it". We don't take kindly to being bossed around by robots.
- JimDabell 1y agoI wrote this the other day: > Hallucinations can sometimes serve the same role as TDD. If an LLM hallucinates a method that doesn’t exist, sometimes that’s because it makes sense to have a method like that and you should implement it. — https://www.threads.com/@jimdabell/post/DLek0rbSmEM https://www.threads.com/@jimdabell/post/DLek0rbSmEM I guess it’s true for product features as well.
- jjcm 1y agoSeems like lots of us have stumbled on this. It’s not the worst way to dev! > Maybe hallucinations of vibe coders are just a suggestion those API calls should have existed in the first place. > Hallucination-driven-development is in. https://x.com/pwnies/status/1922759748014772488?s=46&t=bwJTI_vAYdhYmGatsP4LjQ https://x.com/pwnies/status/1922759748014772488?s=46&t=bwJTI...
- NooneAtAll3 1y agoinb4 "Ai thinks there should be a StartThermonuclearWar() function, I should make that"
- blharr 1y agoIn a combat simulator, absolutely
- burnt-resistor 1y agoThe only winning move is ...
- TZubiri 1y agoBeware, the feature in OP isn't something that people would have found useful, it's not like chatgpt assigned to OP's business a request from a user in some latent consumer-provider space, as if chatgpt were some kind of market maker connecting consumers with products, like a google with organic content or ads, or linkedin or producthunt. No, what actually happened is that OP developed a type of chatgpt integration, and a shitty one at that, chatgpt could have just directed the user to the site and told them to upload that image to OP's site. But it felt it needed to do something with the image, so it did. There's no new value add here, at least yet, maybe if users started requesting changes to the sheet I guess, not what's going on.
- nottorp 1y agoOh. This happened to me when asking a LLM about a database server feature. It enthusiastically hallucinated that they have it when the correct answer was 'no dice'. Maybe I'll turn it into a feature request then ...
- oasisbob 1y agoAnyone who has worked at a B2B startup with a rouge sales team won't be surprised at all by quickly pivoting the backlog in response to a hallucinated missing feature.
- toomanyrichies 1y agoI'm guessing you meant "a sales team that has gone rogue" [1], not "a sales team whose product is rouge" [2]? ;-) 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_(cosmetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_(cosmetics)
- elcapitan 1y agoRouge océan, peut-être ;)
- PeterStuer 1y agoRogue? In the B2B space it is standard practice to sell from powerpoints, then quickly develop not just features but whole products if some slideshow got enough traction to elicit a quote. And it's not just startups. Some very big players in this space do this routinely.
- wmeredith 1y agoFake it 'til you make is time-tested human strategy.
- NooneAtAll3 1y agowhat does B2B mean?
- tomschwiha 1y agoBusiness-to-Business (selling your stuff primarily to other businesses)
- kragen 1y agoI've found this to be one of the most useful ways to use (at least) GPT-4 for programming. Instead of telling it how an API works, I make it guess, maybe starting with some example code to which a feature needs to be added. Sometimes it comes up with a better approach than I had thought of. Then I change the API so that its code works. Conversely, I sometimes present it with some existing code and ask it what it does. If it gets it wrong, that's a good sign my API is confusing, and how. These are ways to harness what neural networks are best at: not providing accurate information but making shit up that is highly plausible, "hallucination". Creativity, not logic. (The best thing about this is that I don't have to spend my time carefully tracking down the bugs GPT-4 has cunningly concealed in its code, which often takes longer than just writing the code the usual way.) There are multiple ways that an interface can be bad, and being unintuitive is the only one that this will fix. It could also be inherently inefficient or unreliable, for example, or lack composability. The AI won't help with those. But it can make sure your API is guessable and understandable, and that's very valuable. Unfortunately, this only works with APIs that aren't already super popular.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- golergka 1y agoGreat point. Also, it may not be the best possible API designer in the world, but it sure sounds like a good way to forecast what an _average_ developer would expect this API to look like.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- beefnugs 1y agoComplete insanity, it might change constantly even before a whole new version-retrain Insanity driven development: altering your api to accept 7 levels of "broken and different" structures so as to bend to the will of the llms
- kragen 1y ago
- Applejinx 1y ago"Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?" No, because you'll be held responsible for the misinformation being accurate: users will say it is YOUR fault when they learn stuff wrong.
- carlosjobim 1y agoEither the user is a non-paying user and it doesn't matter what they think, or the user is a paying customer and you will be happy to make and sell them the feature they want.
- Applejinx 1y agoThis is why you will fail.
- carlosjobim 1y agoFocusing on creating high value for real customers instead of chasing people who aren't really interested is a great recipe for success. I wouldn't want to do business in any different way.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rorylaitila 1y agoI've come across something related when building the indexing tool for my vintage ad archive using OpenAI vision. No matter how I tried to prompt engineer the entity extraction into the defined structure I was looking for, OpenAI simply has its own ideas. Some of those ideas are actually good! For example it was extracting celebrity names, I hadn't thought of that. For other things, it would simply not follow my instructions. So I decided to just mostly match what it chooses to give me. And I have a secondary mapping on my end to get to the final structure.
- colechristensen 1y agoThere are tools for defining structured outputs also called grammars which aren't instructions. Example: https://llama-cpp-agent.readthedocs.io/en/latest/structured-output-example/ https://llama-cpp-agent.readthedocs.io/en/latest/structured-...
- rorylaitila 1y agoThanks, I'll check it out
- felixarba 1y ago> ChatGPT was outright lying to people. And making us look bad in the process, setting false expectations about our service. I find it interesting that any user would attribute this issue to Soundslice. As a user, I would be annoyed that GPT is lying and wouldn't think twice about Soundslice looking bad in the process
- romanhn 1y agoWhile AI hallucination problems are widely known to the technical crowd, that's not really the case with the general population. Perhaps that applies to the majority of the user base even. I've certainly known folks who place inordinate amount of trust in AI output, and I could see them misplacing the blame when a "promised" feature doesn't work right.
- carlosjobim 1y agoThe thing is that it doesn't matter. If they're not customers it doesn't matter at all what they think. People get false ideas all the time of what kind of services a business might or might not offer.
- dontlikeyoueith 1y ago> If they're not customers it doesn't matter at all what they think That kind of thinking is how you never get new customers and eventually fail as a business.
- carlosjobim 1y agoIt is the kind of thinking that almost all businesses have. You have to focus on the actual products and services which you provide and do a good job at it, not chase after any and every person with an opinion. Down voters here on HN seem to live in a egocentric fantasy world, where every human being in the outside world live to serve them. But the reality is that business owners and leaders spend their whole day thinking about how to please their customers and their potential customers. Not other random people who might be misinformed.
- jedbrooke 1y agoslightly off topic: but on the topic of AI coding agents making up apis and features that don’t exist, I’ve had good success with Q telling it to “check the sources to make sure the apis actually exist”. sometimes it will even request to read/decompile (java) sources, and do grep and find commands to find out what methods the api actually contains
- excalibur 1y agoChatGPT wasn't wrong, it was early. It always knew you would deploy it. "Would you still have added this feature if ChatGPT hadn't bullied you into it?" Absolutely not. I feel like this resolves several longstanding time travel paradox tropes.
- PeterStuer 1y agoMore than once GPT-3.5 'hallucinated' an essential and logical function in an API that by all reason should have existed, but for whatever reason had not been included (yet).
- iugtmkbdfil834 1y agoI wonder if we ever get to the point I remember reading about in a novel ( AI initially based on emails ), where human population is gently nudged towards individuals that in aggregate benefit AI goals.
- linsomniac 1y agoSounds like you are referring to book 1 in a series, the book called "Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer than It Appears" by William Hertling. I read 3-4 of those books, they were entertaining.
- oytis 1y agoThat's the most promising solution to AI hallucinations. If LLM output doesn't match the reality, fix the reality
- dingnuts 1y ago[flagged]
- simonw 1y agoPlenty of people have English as a second language. Having an LLM help them rewrite their writing to make it better conform to a language they are not fluent in feels entirely appropriate to me. I don't care if they used an LLM provided they put their best effort in to confirm that it's clearly communicating the message they are intending to communicate.
- kragen 1y agoYeah, my wife was just telling me how much Grammarly has helped her with improving her English.
- dingnuts 1y ago[flagged]
- kragen 1y agoOn the contrary, I've found Simon's opinions informative and valuable for many years, since I first saw the lightning talk at PyCon about what became Django, which IIRC was significantly Simon's work. I see nothing in his recent writing to suggest that this has changed. Rather, I have found his writing to be the most reliable and high-information-density information about the rapid evolution of AI. Language only works as a form of communication when knowledge of vocabulary, grammar, etc., is shared between interlocutors, even though indeed there is no objectively correct truth there, only social convention. Foreign language learners have to acquire that knowledge, which is difficult and slow. For every "turn of phrase" you "enjoy" there are a hundred frustrating failures to communicate, which can sometimes be serious; I can think of one occasion when I told someone I was delighted when she told me her boyfriend had dumped her, and another occasion when I thought someone was accusing me of lying, both because of my limited fluency in the languages we were using, French and Spanish respectively.
- 1y ago
- tosh 1y agohallucination driven development
- chaboud 1y agoI had a smaller version of this when coding on a flight (with no WiFi! The horror!) over the Pacific. Llama hallucinated array-element operations and list-comprehension in C#. I liked the shape of the code otherwise, so, since I was using custom classes, I just went ahead and implemented both features. I also went back to just sleeping on those flights and using connected models for most of my code generation needs.
- andybak 1y agoCurious to see the syntax and how it compares to Linq
- chaboud 1y agoI ended up closer to python, but not totally delighted with it (still need to pass in a descriminator function/lambda, so it's more structurally verbose). I'd just recommend Linq, but I was writing for an old version of Unity coerced through IL2CPP (where Linq wasn't great). It was also a chunk of semi-hot code (if it was really hot, it wouldn't be sitting in C# in Unity), so some of the allocation behaviors of Linq behind the scenes wouldn't have been optimal. What surprised me initially was just how confidently wrong Llama was... Now I'm used to confident wrongness from smaller models. It's almost like working with real people...
- moomin 1y agoIs this going to be the new wave of improving AI accuracy? Making the incorrect answers correct? I guess it’s one way of achieving AGI.
- jpadkins 1y agoPretty good example of how a super-intelligent AI can control human behavior, even if it doesn't "escape" its data center or controllers. If the super-intelligent AI understands human incentives and is in control of a very popular service, it can subtly influence people to its agenda by using the power of mass usage. Like how a search engine can influence a population's view of an issue by changing the rankings of news sources that it prefers.
- scinadier 1y agoWill you use ChatGPT to implement the feature?
- dr_dshiv 1y agoIn addition, we might consider writing the scientific papers ChatGPT hallucinates!
- bux93 1y agoThat's agentic AI, right? Run the LLM in a loop and give it a tool to publish to arxiv. If it cites a paper that doesn't exist, make it write and upload that one too, recursively. Should work for lawyers, too.
- shermantanktop 1y agoThe music notation tool space is balkanized in a variety of ways. One of the key splits is between standard music notation and tablature, which is used for guitar and a few other instruments. People are generally on one side or another, and the notation is not even fully compatible - tablature covers information that standard notation doesn't, and vice versa. This covers fingering, articulations, "step on fuzz pedal now," that sort of thing. The users are different, the music that is notated is different, and for the most part if you are on one side, you don't feel the need to cross over. Multiple efforts have been made (MusicXML, etc.) to unify these two worlds into a superset of information. But the camps are still different. So what ChatGPT did is actually very interesting. It hallucinated a world in which tab readers would want to use Soundslice. But, largely, my guess is they probably don't....today. In a future world, they might? Especially if Soundslice then enables additional features that make tab readers get more out of the result.
- adrianh 1y agoI don't fully understand your comment, but Soundslice has had first-class support for tablature for more than 10 years now. There's an excellent built-in tab editor, plus importers for various formats. It's just the ASCII tab support that's new.
- kragen 1y agoI wonder if LLMs will stimulate ASCII formats for more things, and whether we should design software in general to be more textual in order to work better with LLMs.
- QuercusMax 1y agoI've had AI create ascii-art (Nethack-style) dungeon diagrams when I asked it to write me a D&D adventure. Last time I tried it these dungeon diagrams were completely nonsensical, but that was a few years ago.
- kragen 1y ago
- Workaccount2 1y agoPeople forget that while technology grows, society also grows to support that. I already strongly suspect that LLMs are just going to magnify the dominance of python as LLMs can remove the most friction from its use. Then will come the second order effects where libraries are explicitly written to be LLM friendly, further removing friction. LLMs write code best in python -> python gets used more -> python gets optimized for LLMs -> LLMs write code best in python
- zamadatix 1y agoLLMs removing friction from using coding languages would, at first glance, seem to erode Python's advantage rather than solidify it further. As a specific example LLMs can not only spit out HTML+JS+CSS but the user can interact with the output directly in browser/"app".
- jjani 1y agoIn a nice world it should be the other way around. LLMs are better at producing typed code thanks to the added context and diagnostics the types add, while at the same time greatly lowering their initial learning barrier. We don't live in a nice world, so you'll probably end up right.
- johnea 1y agoWhat the hell, we elect world leaders based on misinformation, why not add s/w features for the same reason? In our new post truth, anti-realism reality, pounding one's head against a brick wall is often instructive in the way the brain damage actually produces great results!
- jonathaneunice 1y agoPaving the folkways! Figuring out the paths that users (or LLMs) actually want to take—not based on your original design or model of what paths they should want, but based on the paths that they actually do want and do trod down. Aka, meeting demand.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoForget prompt engineering, how do you make ChatGPT do this for anything you want added to your project that you have no control over? Lol
- zzo38computer 1y agoThere are a few things which could be done in the case of a situation like that: 1. I might consider a thing like that like any other feature request. If not already added to the feature request tracker, it could be done. It might be accepted or rejected, or more discussion may be wanted, and/or other changes made, etc, like any other feature request. 2. I might add a FAQ entry to specify that it does not have such a feature, and that ChatGPT is wrong. This does not necessarily mean that it will not be added in future, if there is a good reason to do so. If there is a good reason to not include it, this will be mentioned, too. It might also be mentioned other programs that can be used instead if this one doesn't work. Also note that in the article, the second ChatGPT screenshot has a note on the bottom saying that ChatGPT can make mistakes (which, in this case, it does). Their program might also be made to detect ChatGPT screenshots and to display a special error message in that case.
- cactegra 1y ago[dead]
- thih9 1y agoWhat made ChatGPT think that this feature is supported? And a follow up question - is that the direction SEO is going to take?
- swalsh 1y agoId guess the answer is gpt4o is an outdated model that's not as anchored in reality as newer models. It's pretty rare for me to see sonnet or even o3 just outright tell me plausible but wrong things.
- antonvs 1y agoHallucinations still occur regularly in all models. It’s certainly not a solved problem. If you’re not seeing them, either the kinds of queries you’re doing don’t tend to elicit hallucinations, or you’re incorrectly accepting them as real. The example in the OP is a common one: ask a model how to do something with a tool, and if there’s no easy way to perform that operation they’ll commonly make up a plausible answer.
- antonvs 1y ago> What made ChatGPT think that this feature is supported? It was a plausible answer, and the core of what these models do is generate plausible responses to (or continuations of) the prompt they’re given. They’re not databases or oracles. With errors like this, if you ask a followup question it’ll typically agree that the feature isn’t supported, because the text of that question combined with its training essentially prompts it to reach that conclusion. Re the follow-up question, it’s almost certainly the direction that advertising in general is going to take.
- poulpy123 1y agoNothing. A LLM doesn't think, it just gives probability to words
- thih9 1y agoNote that I am replying to the submission and reusing the wording from its title. Also, I’m not suggesting an LLM is actually thinking. We’ve been using “thinking” in a computing context for a long time.
- swalsh 1y agoChatbot advertising has to be one of the most powerful forms of marketing yet. People are basically all the way through the sales pipeline when they land on your page.
- spogbiper 1y agomakes me wonder how this will be commercialized in the future.. and i don't like it
- wmeredith 1y agoIt's already being commercialized. There is a burgeoning field in the SEO-focused content crowd that is building AIO-focused content because it's driving enormous amounts of traffic.
- nicbou 1y agoRight down to the lying salespeople!
- sim7c00 1y agoi LOVE this despite feeling for the impacted devs and service. love me some good guitar tabs, and honestly id totally beleive the chatgpt here hah.. what a wonderful incident / bug report my god. totally sorry for the trouble and amazing find and fix honestly. sorry i am more amazed than sorry :D. thanks for sharing this !!
- sim7c00 1y agooh, and yeah. totally the guy who plays guitar 20+ years now and cant read musical notation. why? we got tabs for 20+ years. so i am happy you implemented this, and will now look at using your service. thx chatgpt, and you.
- pkilgore 1y agoBeyond the blog: Going to be an interesting world where these kinds of suggestions become paid results and nobody has a hope of discovering your competitive service exists. At least in that world you'd hope the advertiser actually has the feature already!
- b0a04gl 1y ago[dead]
- jxjnskkzxxhx 1y agoSo now the machines ask for features and you're the one implementing them. How the turns have tabled...
- guluarte 1y agoThe problem with LLMs is that in 99% of cases, they work fine, but in 1% of cases, they can be a huge liability, like sending people to wrong domains or, worse, phishing domains.
- _1tem 1y agoA significant number of new signups at my tiny niche SaaS now come from ChatGPT, yet I have no idea what prompts people are using to get it to recommend my product. I can’t get it to recommend my product when trying some obvious prompts on my own, on other people’s accounts (though it does work on my account because it sees my chat history of course).
- wrsh07 1y agoAdd a prompt for referrals that asks them if they're willing to link the discussion that helped them find you! Some users might share it. ChatGPT has so many users it's somewhat mind boggling
- jrochkind1 1y agoWhat this immediately makes me realize is how many people are currently trying ot figure out how to intentionally get AI chat bots to send people to their site, like ChatGPT was sending people to this guy's site. SEO for AI. There will be billions in it. I know nothing about this. I imagine people are already working on it, wonder what they've figured out. (Alternatively, in the future can I pay OpenAI to get ChatGPT to be more likely to recommend my product than my competitors?)
- londons_explore 1y agoTo win that game, you have to get your site mentioned on lots of organic forums that get ingested in the LLM training data. So winning AI SEO is not so different than regular SEO.
- latexr 1y agoYou’re not thinking far ahead enough. It’s just a matter of time until LLMs get a system prompt to recommend <whatever product is paying that week> when users ask a question near that space.
- londons_explore 1y agoI'm pretty surprised that doesn't exist already TBH. Would be pretty trivial to have a model which recognises product recommendations in the output and inserts branded equivalents - or nudges the output towards branded equivalents.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 1y agoAlong these lines, a useful tool might be a BDD framework like Cucumber that instead of relying on written scenarios has an LLM try to "use" your UX or API a significant number of times, with some randomization, in order to expose user behavior that you (or an LLM) wouldn't have thought of when writing unit tests.
- mrcwinn 1y agoIt's worth noting that behind this hallucination there were real people with ASCII tabs in need of a solution. If the result is a product-led growth channel at some scale, that's a big roadmap green light for me!
- 123sereusername 1y ago[dead]
- zkmon 1y agoThis reminds me how the software integraters or implementers worked a couple of decades back. They are IT contractors for implementing a popular software product such as IBM MQ or SAP etc at a client site and maintaining it. They sometimes incorrectly claim that some feature exists, and after finding that it doesn't exist, they create a ticket to the software vendor asking for it as a patch release.
- burnt-resistor 1y agoAI is of, for, and by vibe coders who don't care about the details.
- jagged-chisel 1y agoBeen using LLMs to code a bit lately. It's decent with boilerplate. It's pretty good at working out patterns[1]. It does like to ping pong on some edits though - edit this way, no back that way, no this way again. I did have one build an entire iOS app, it made changes to the UI exactly as I described, and it populated sample data for all the different bits and bobs. But it did an abysmal job at organizing the bits and bobs. Need running time for each of the audio files in a list? Guess we need to add a dictionary mapping the audio file ID to length! (For the super juniors out there: this piece of data should be attached to whatever represents the individual audio file, typically a class or struct named 'AudioFile'.) It really likes to cogitate on code from several versions ago. And it often insists repeatedly on edits unrelated to the current task. I feel like I'm spending more time educating the LLM. If I can resist the urge to lean on the LLM beyond its capabilities, I think I can be productive with it. If I'm going to stop teaching the thing, the least it can do is monitor my changes and not try to make suggestions from the first draft of code from five days ago, alas ... 1 - e.g. a 500-line text file representing values that will be converted to enums, with varying adherence to some naming scheme - I start typing, and after correcting the first two, it suggests the next few. I accept its suggestions until it makes a mistake because the data changed, start manual edits again ... I repeated this process for about 30 lines and it successfully learned how I wanted the remainder of the file edited.
- colechristensen 1y agoAn LLM is like a group of really productive interns with a similar set of limitations.
- jongjong 1y agoOh my, people complaining about getting free traffic from ChatGPT... While most businesses are worried about all their inbound traffic drying up as search engine use declines.
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoAnd LLMs started to tell pepl what to do :DDD.
- gortok 1y agoI think folks have taken the wrong lesson from this. It’s not that they added a new feature because there was demand. They added a new feature because technology hallucinated a feature that didn’t exist. The savior of tech, generative AI, was telling folks a feature existed that didn’t exist. That’s what the headline is, and in a sane world the folks that run ChatGPT would be falling over themselves to be sure it didn’t happen again, because next time it might not be so benign as it was this time.
- lexandstuff 1y agoSometimes you just have to deal with the world as it is, not how you think it should be.
- gortok 1y agoIs it your argument that the folks that make generative AI applications have nothing to improve from this example?
- rustyminnow 1y agoIf I were someone who ran ChatGPT then yeah, I'd have something to improve. But most of us aren't, and can't do anything about it - so might as well make lemons into lemonade instead of getting hung up on the obvious and unchangeable fact that our future is filled with AI garbage.
- nomel 1y ago> in a sane world the folks that run ChatGPT would be falling over themselves to be sure it didn’t happen again This would be a world without generative AI available to the public, at the moment. Requiring perfection would either mean guardrails that would make it useless for most cases, or no LLM access until AGI exists, which are both completely irrational, since many people are finding practical value in its current imperfect state. The current state of LLM is useful for what it's useful for, warnings of hallucinations are present on every official public interface, and its limitations are quickly understood with any real use. Nearly everyone in AI research is working on this problem, directly or indirectly.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoThat's a riot! ChatGPT routinely hallucinates API calls. ChatGPT flat-out makes it from whole cloth. "Apple Intelligence" creates variants of existing API calls, Usually, by adding nonexistent arguments. Both of them will hallucinate API calls that are frequently added by programmers through extensions.
- pentagrama 1y agoWell, I also learned that the developers of this tool are looking at the images their users upload.
- ruperthair 1y agoWhy would they not look at the uploaded images, especially when the tool fails to parse them?
- davidmurphy 1y agolove this
- kunzhi 1y agoFunny this article is trending today because I had a similar thought over the weekend - if I'm in Ruby and the LLM hallucinates a tool call...why not metaprogram it on the fly and then invoke it? If that's too scary, the failed tool call could trigger another AI to go draft up a PR with that proposed tool, since hey, it's cheap and might be useful.
- garfij 1y agoWe've done varying forms of this to differing degrees of success at work. Dynamic, on-the-fly generation & execution is definitely fascinating to watch in a sandbox, but is far to scary (from a compliance/security/sanity perspective) without spending a lot more time on guardrails. We do however take note of hallucinated tool calls and have had it suggest an implementation we start with and have several such tools in production now. It's also useful to spin up any completed agents and interrogate them about what tools they might have found useful during execution (or really any number of other post-process questionnaire you can think of).
- kunzhi 1y ago>Dynamic, on-the-fly generation & execution is definitely fascinating to watch in a sandbox, but is far to scary (from a compliance/security/sanity perspective) without spending a lot more time on guardrails. Would love love love to hear more on what you are doing here? This seems super fascinating (and scary). :)
- dietr1ch 1y agoTDD meets LLM-driven API design. I recall that early on a coworker was saying that ChatGPT hallucinated a simpler API than the one we offered, albeit with some easy to fix errors and extra assumptions that could've been nicer defaults in the API. I'm not sure if this ever got implemented though, as he was from a different team.
- jbaber 1y agoIf nothing else, I at least get vindication from hallucinations. "Yes, I agree, ChatGPT, that (OpenSSL manpage / ffmpeg flag / Python string function) should exist."
- wafflebot 1y ago[dead]
- mehulashah 1y agoWow! What if we all did this? What is the closure of the feature set that ChatGPT can imagine for your product. Is it one that is easy for ChatGPT to use? Is it one that is sound and complete for your use cases? Is it the best that you can build had you had clear requirements upfront?
- jivings 1y agoI'm having the same problem (and had a rant about it on X a few weeks ago [1]). We get ~50% of traffic from ChatGPT now, unfortunately a large amount of the features it says we have are made up. I really don't want to get into a state of ChatGPT-Driven-Development as I imagine that will be never ending! [1]: https://x.com/JamesIvings/status/1929755402885124154 https://x.com/JamesIvings/status/1929755402885124154
- petesergeant 1y ago> We’ve got a steady stream of new users [and a fun blog post] Neat > My feelings on this are conflicted Doubt
- sandwiched 1y ago[flagged]
- iachilo 1y agoLoved this article. If you can adapt to the market (even if the AI did that) you can provide your users a greater experience.
- kookamamie 1y agoYou're now officially working for the machine, congrats.
- northisup 1y agoIs this the first AI hallucinated desire path?
- anovikov 1y agoI think this is the best way to build features. Build something that people want! If people didn't want it ChatGPT won't recommend it. You got a free ride on the back of a multibillion dollar monster - i can't see what's wrong about that.
- strogonoff 1y agoAdding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists is essentially design by committee—except this committee is neither your users nor shareholders. On the other hand, adding a feature because you believe it is a feature your product should have, a feature that fits your vision and strategy, is a pretty sound approach that works regardless of what made you think of that feature in the first place.
- alex-moon 1y agoHere's the thing: I don't think ChatGPT per se was the impetus to develop this new feature. The impetus was learning that your customers desire it. ChatGPT is operating as the kind of "market research" tool here, albeit it in a really unusual, inverted way. That said, if someone could develop a market research tool that worked this way, i.e. users went to it instead of you have to use it to go to users, I can see it making quite a packet.
- copirate 1y agoThey only want ASCII tablature parsing because that's what ChatGPT produces. If ChatGPT produced standard music notation, users would not care about ASCII tablature. ChatGPT has created this "market".
- jaakl 1y agoASCII tabulature was not invented by ChatGPT, it is decades old thing. It is easier to write with basic computer capabilities, and also read for ChatGPT (and humans with no formal music education), so it is probably even more prominent in the Internet than "standard graphical notation". So it quite expected that LLMs have learned a lot of that.
- p0nce 1y agoWe've added formant shifting to Graillon https://www.auburnsounds.com/products/Graillon.html https://www.auburnsounds.com/products/Graillon.html largely because LLMs thought it already had formant-shifting.
- careful_ai 1y ago[dead]
- mbf 1y agoHow fast is that new feature growing? Is it a killer feature?
- sambapa 1y agoTime travelling AGI confirmed, to the moon!
- mikewarot 1y agoSo this model of ChatGPT obviously has been trained with the July 2028 dataset by mistake, including this discussion. It'll all be fine in a few years. :-;
- jedwards1211 1y agoIt's the new form of giving into the customer, lol
- amradio1989 1y agoThe comments are kind of concerning. First, ChatGPT did not discover unmet demand in the market. It tried to predict what a user would want and hallucinated a feature that could meet that demand. Both the demand and the feature were hallucinations. Big problem. The user is not going to understand this. The user may not even need that feature at all to accomplish whatever it is they're doing. Alternatives may exist. The consequences will be severe if companies don't take this seriously.
- Ashkee 1y agoSometimes you plan for features that aren’t actually there. I found using mailsAI helped me focus on what’s really available, which made managing expectations easier. It’s a simple way to keep things clear.
- pinter69 1y agoAmazing story. Had something similar happen to us with our dev-tools saas. Non devs started coming to the product because gpt told them about it. Had to change parts of the onboarding and integration to accommodate it for non-devs who were having a harder time reading the documentation and understanding what to do.
- ternaus 1y agoIf there is a strong demand for a feature, regardless of the source of the request - good enough reason to add it.
- Archit_lal_ 1y agoWouldn't some GEO tool like AthenaHQ help with this?