ChatGPT often hallucinated about the music app Soundslice, so the founder made the lie come true.

Earlier this month, Adrian Holovaty, founder of music-teaching platform Soundslice , solved a mystery that had been plaguing him for weeks. Weird images of what were clearly ChatGPT sessions kept being uploaded to the site.

Once he solved it, he realized that ChatGPT had become one of his company's greatest hype men - but it was also lying to people about what his app could do.

Holovaty is best known as one of the creators of the open-source Django project , a popular Python web development framework (although he retired from managing the project in 2014). In 2012, he launched Soundslice, which remains "proudly bootstrapped," he tells TechCrunch. Currently, he is focused on his music career. both as an artist and as a founder.

Soundslice is an app for teaching music, used by students and teachers. It is known for its video player synchronized with music notations that guide users on how the notes should be played.

It also offers a feature called "sheet music scanner" 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.

Holovaty carefully watches this feature's error logs to see what problems occur and where to add improvements, he said.

That's where he started seeing the uploaded ChatGPT sessions.

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's a basic text-based system used for guitar notations that uses a regular keyboard. (There's no treble key, for instance, on your standard QWERTY keyboard.)

The volume of these ChatGPT session images was not so burdensome that it was costing his company money to store them or crushing his app's bandwidth, Holovaty said. He was baffled, he wrote. in a blog post about the situation.

Our scanning system wasn't 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 - until I messed around with ChatGPT myself.

That's 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't. Uploading those images wouldn't translate the ASCII tab into audio notes.

He was faced with a new problem. "The main cost was reputational: new Soundslice users were coming in with false expectations. They had been confidently told we would do something that we actually don't," he described to TechCrunch.

He and his team discussed their options: Slap disclaimers all over the site about it — "No, we can't turn a ChatGPT session into hearable music" — or build that feature into the scanner, even though he had never before considered supporting that offbeat musical notation system.

He opted to build the feature.

"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?" he wrote.

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.

The fellow programmers on Hacker News had an interesting take about it: Several of them said that it's no different than an over-eager human salesperson promising the world to prospects and then forcing developers to deliver new features.

"I think that's a very fitting and amusing comparison!" Holovaty agreed.

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ChatGPT Remembers Everything About You—But Is This A Good Thing? - Dear Media

The gut-punch Black Mirror The episode "Be Right Back," from 2013, imagines a type of ChatGPT AI that consumes a lifetime of texts, posts, and videos to rebuild a dead boyfriend. At first, the replica feels comforting, yet the more perfectly it recalls every detail, the more painfully it exposes what real people are: contradictory, impatient, and sometimes selfish.

That chilling thought sits at the heart of today's debate over ChatGPT, because a tool that never forgets can be a brilliant assistant or a relentless archivist, depending on who is holding the receipts.

Martha's (Hayley Atwell) android boyfriend (Domhall Gleeson) proves that endless memory isn't automatically loving. The same question hovers over ChatGPT: Does total recall empower users or trap them in a data loop they can't escape? The Intersect with Cory Corrine dives straight into that tension. Corrine opens with a reality check, noting that "ChatGPT remembers everything about you, which is part of what makes it powerful." But power, of course, cuts both ways.

ChatGPT enters the mainstream and Gen Z embraces 'data nihilism' ‘

"A colleague of mine on the show noted that on the train last week, every single person that she saw had their laptop open to ChatGPT," Corrine remarked regarding her recent conversation. Tech and culture journalist Taylor Lorenz, one of The Intersect 's two guests, observes a new resignation among young users, calling it "data nihilism." Today's teens and Gen Zers offer a collective shrug, demurring, "What power do I have?" because they're assuming their information is already scattered across the web.

Yet that shrug can mask real risks. "We're left with no choice but to proceed, but proceed with caution," Corrine states.

AI: the risks and rewards

Privacy scholar Dr. Jen King, another guest on The Intersect, reminds listeners that defaults matter. "Those chats are being, for the most part, collected by default and being used to retrain these systems," she says. So, unless users toggle settings, every prompt becomes training fuel. King is a privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence .

“I personally use a service called DeleteMe to remove my data from the web,” Lorenz says. King counters with a bigger-picture warning, noting, “The value proposition right now for most of these [AI] tools is really oversold.”

When Corrine asks whether the conveniences outweigh the costs, Lorenz doesn’t slam the brakes. "Try it out, see if it’s useful for something," she suggests. "But just go into it in a mindful way."

King echoes that vibe, stressing that limitless personalization invites manipulation. She flags looming "AI agents and just this increased desire to make personalized experiences for everybody," suggesting that a chatbot that recommends a fire extinguisher might quietly steer users toward the brand that paid for placement.

How to keep your data—and sanity—intact

Proceeding with caution doesn't mean abandoning technology. It means adjusting habits so that ChatGPT serves you rather than surveils you.

• Check the settings first. Turn off chat history if the platform allows; King notes that many systems collect data by default.
• Limit what you share. Lorenz highlights how users "might be actually disclosing a lot more data than they realize" during casual prompts. Sensitive health or financial details deserve an offline notebook, not an AI text box.
• Scrub what's already out there. Services like DeleteMe help, and so does an old-fashioned Google search of your name.
• Advocate for better laws. Lorenz urges listeners to "focus on data privacy and advocate for it" because systemic rules protect everyone.
• Remember the off switch. King keeps location tracking disabled because constant pings "paint a portrait of what you're doing and everywhere you go."

ChatGPT's memory is a black mirror, so use it wisely.

Black Mirror warned that perfect recall can feel inhuman, and Corrine’s panel shows the warning is no longer fiction. ChatGPT can draft résumés, brainstorm trip itineraries, or teach quadratic equations at lightning speed. It can also stockpile heartbreak diaries and late-night confessions for uses that no one has yet imagined. The most intelligent move isn’t panic; it’s mindfulness.

ChatGPT , Cory Corrine , Taylor Lorenz , technology , The Intersect

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