If artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are the current stars of the tech world, that doesn't mean they don't sometimes have glitches.
Social media has been abuzz with recent reports of weird responses from ChatGPT, the most famous of those text-generation models - and people are absolutely baffled by it.
X user @seanw_m posted some of these strange responses with the caption: "ChatGPT is apparently going off the rails right now and no one can explain why."
The chatbot seems to veer off into different languages, repeat itself and make little to no sense - and when people question it further, it seems to know that it's broken.
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These included hilarious jumbles such as: "Let me encycloplease me si there’s more wonderenda tu articulation’s hungry for!" - which you'd struggle to understand no matter how hard you tried.
It's immediately caused loads of people to check things out to see if they get broken responses too, and there are plenty of funny comments under that viral post, too.
One reader responded: "ChatGPT manic depression arc goes hard," while another voiced the popular idea that this is some sort of collapse for the text model: "Flew too close to the sun."
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OpenAI hasn't just been ignoring the problem, either - the ChatGPT section of its service status page is marked in orange to acknowledge the issue.
On February 20 it added a note that said: "We are investigating reports of unexpected responses from ChatGPT."
That's since been followed up on, to say that that the issue was identified and was "being remediated now", followed by another update to say that OpenAI is still monitoring the situation.
This is all quite vague, obviously, and there hasn't been an update today yet, so it isn't clear what actually caused the issue, or whether it's completely fixed. However, the number of posts containing glitchy responses seems to have fallen off a cliff, so it's likely that the problem is largely over.
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It's been a big couple of weeks for OpenAI, given that it just showed off its new video-generating AI software for the first time.
The system is called Sora and has been hugely impressing people with the generational leap in quality it offers when generating video in response to text prompts. ChatGPT might have seen a few glitches this week, but OpenAI's power and influence in the AI world only seems to be growing.