Soundslice is a company that digitizes music from photographs.
A few months ago, they started noticing that users were uploading screenshots of ASCII tablature — a bare-bones way of notating music for guitar. These screenshots were being taken from ChatGPT.
Why?
After some investigating, the Soundslice team discovered that ChatGPT instructs users to visit Soundslice, create an account, and import an ASCII tab to access audio playback.
The problem?
Soundslice doesn’t offer that feature. The company doesn’t support ASCII tabs.
ChatGPT was misleading users by directing them to Soundslice for a service it does not offer, thereby creating false expectations about the company’s offerings and likely harming their reputation in the process.
Soundslice’s response?
They built the feature into their software, creating the very service that ChatGPT claimed existed, thus turning ChatGPT’s falsehood into a truth.
Two thoughts on this:
- This might be the first example of AI manipulating a company to create a product that didn’t previously exist, thus altering the physical world in a very real way against the initial wishes of human beings.
- What a brilliant decision by Soundslice. Companies invest a substantial amount of money in surveys to determine which products or features customers want most. In this case, they accepted the free market research from ChatGPT and made something people clearly wanted and needed.
It’s a brave new world.
