ChatGPT invented a feature for a product out of thin air. This company created it.

On Sunday, sheet music platform Soundslice launched. According to the company developed a new feature after discovering that ChatGPT had incorrectly told users that the service could import ASCII Tablature – a text-based format for guitar notation the company never supported. This incident marks the first time a business has built functionality in response to a model’s confabulation.

Soundslice digitizes music from photos or pdfs, and syncs it with audio or video recordings. This allows musicians to hear the music as they scroll through the sheet music. The platform includes tools to slow down playback, and practice difficult passages.

Adrian Holovatyco-founder of Soundslice, wrote in a post on his blog that the recent feature development began as a mystery. Holovaty noticed unusual activity in the error logs of the company a few months ago. Instead of uploading sheet music, users were sending screenshots of ChatGPT conversation containing ASCII Tablature – simple text representations for guitar music that look similar to strings with numbers indicating fret position. Holovaty wrote

“Our scanning system wasn’t intended to support this style of notation,” in the blog. Holovaty discovered the confusion when he tested ChatGPT. The AI model instructed users to create Soundslice account and use the platform for ASCII tabs to playback audio–a feature which didn’t exist. Holovaty wrote: “We’ve never supported ASCII tab; ChatGPT was outright lying to people,” Holovaty, “and making us look bad in the process, setting false expectations about our service.”

When AI models like ChatGPT generate false information with apparent confidence, AI researchers call it a “hallucination” or “confabulation.” The problem of AI models confabulating false information has plagued AI models since ChatGPT’s public release in November 2022, when people began erroneously using the chatbot as a replacement for a search engine.