Soundslice’s website | Image Credits:Soundslice <\/p>\n
Earlier this month, Adrian Holovaty, founder of music-teaching platform Soundslice<\/a>, solved a mystery that had been plaguing him for weeks. Weird images of what were clearly ChatGPT sessions kept being uploaded to the site.<\/p>\n Once he solved it, he realized that ChatGPT had become one of his company\u2019s greatest hype men \u2014 but it was also lying to people about what his app could do.<\/p>\n Holovaty is best known as one of the creators of the open source Django project<\/a>, a popular Python web development framework (though he retired from managing the project in 2014). In 2012, he launched Soundslice, which remains \u201cproudly bootstrapped,\u201d he tells TechCrunch. Currently, he\u2019s focused on his music career both as an artist<\/a> and as a founder.<\/p>\n Soundslice is an app for teaching music, used by students and teachers. It\u2019s known for its video player synchronized to the music notations that guide users on how the notes should be played.<\/p>\n It also offers a feature called \u201csheet music scanner\u201d that allows users to upload an image of paper sheet music and, using AI, will automatically turn that into an interactive sheet, complete with notations.<\/p>\n Holovaty carefully watches this feature\u2019s error logs to see what problems occur, where to add improvements, he said.<\/p>\n That\u2019s where he started seeing the uploaded ChatGPT sessions.<\/p>\n They were creating a bunch of error logs. Instead of images of sheet music, these were images of words and a box of symbols known as ASCII tablature. That\u2019s a basic text-based system used for guitar notations that uses a regular keyboard. (There\u2019s no treble key, for instance, on your standard QWERTY keyboard.)<\/p>\n The volume of these ChatGPT session images was not so onerous that it was costing his company money to store them and crushing his app\u2019s bandwidth, Holovaty said. He was baffled, he wrote in a blog post<\/a> about the situation.<\/p>\n \u201cOur scanning system wasn\u2019t intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks \u2014 until I messed around with ChatGPT myself.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s how he saw ChatGPT telling people they could hear this music by opening a Soundslice account and uploading the image of the chat session. Only, they couldn\u2019t. Uploading those images wouldn\u2019t translate the ASCII tab into audio notes.<\/p>\n He was struck with a new problem. \u201cThe main cost was reputational: New Soundslice users were going in with a false expectation. They\u2019d been confidently told we would do something that we don\u2019t actually do,\u201d he described to TechCrunch.<\/p>\n He and his team discussed their options: Slap disclaimers all over the site about it \u2014 \u201cNo, we can\u2019t turn a ChatGPT session into hearable music\u201d \u2014 or build that feature into the scanner, even though he had never before considered supporting that offbeat musical notation system.<\/p>\n He opted to build the feature.<\/p>\n \u201cMy feelings on this are conflicted. I\u2019m 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?\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n He also wondered if this was the first documented case of a company having to develop a feature because ChatGPT kept repeating, to many people, its hallucination about it.<\/p>\n Image Credits:<\/strong>Adrian Holovaty <\/p>\n