Worst/funniest generative AI fails you’ve seen?

[Matt N]

Hi guys. Since its dawn a year or two ago, generative AI has taken the world by storm. The likes of ChatGPT have shown impressive ability to churn out convincing looking stuff, from essays to code. It really is impressive stuff!

But this generative AI is still very new tech, and as such, it still has its moments where it fails big time. If you put in the right prompt and fool it just enough, you can still get a rather bad (or funny, depending on your outlook!) result from it. With this in mind, I’d be keen to know; what are some of the worst/funniest generative AI fails you’ve seen?

I’ll get the ball rolling with one I saw when I was looking at the Reddit page for Duolingo, the popular language learning app, earlier today. I found myself looking at r/duolingo after reflecting on its eccentricities from my own learning using it, but I was scrolling down through it when I found someone posting about the rather odd example that the ChatGPT-powered learning feature in the higher Duolingo Max tier was using to teach them the concept of reflexive verbs in French:

Source:
From: https://www.reddit.com/r/duolingo/comments/1gbjbrw/wait_what/

Yes, “je me masturbe” does mean “I masturbate myself” in French… seeing as Duolingo is designed for ages 3 and up, I think this is a prime example of where AI churned out something without considering context! I’d definitely call that a pretty bad generative AI fail myself!

But I’d be interested to know; what are some of the worst/funniest generative AI fails you’ve seen?

 

[Zeock]

These two are pretty bad.

 

[Alsty]

I saw some posts about this so tried it myself. Ask Chat GPT to generate an empty room without any elephants...



It even confidently says "Here is an image of an empty room with absolutely no elephants"

A great question in psychology though as I think people work the same way. If you tell them not to think of something, they have to think of the thing to then not think of it.

 

[rob666]

Reminds me of an old joke.
What is yellow and invisible?
No bananas.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

I saw some posts about this so tried it myself. Ask Chat GPT to generate an empty room without any elephants...



It even confidently says "Here is an image of an empty room with absolutely no elephants"

A great question in psychology though as I think people work the same way. If you tell them not to think of something, they have to think of the thing to then not think of it.

Gemini, on the other hand, appears to not have a problem with this.

 

[Alsty]

Yes from what I can see it's a problem that affects the OpenAI DALL-E models, so sites like ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing Image Creator, and Microsoft Copilot have this phenomenom.



Gemini uses a different model created by Google and does not seem to be affected in the same way.

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

Yes from what I can see it's a problem that affects the OpenAI DALL-E models, so sites like ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing Image Creator, and Microsoft Copilot have this phenomenom.



Gemini uses a different model created by Google and does not seem to be affected in the same way.

Imagen, is the name of the model.

Have OpenAI fixed their maths problems yet? Ie the ability to count letters in a word.

 

[Matt N]

If my exam revision over the winter is anything to go by, ChatGPT has not entirely fixed its arithmetic problems.

I have to give it, it was very good at generating me hypothesis testing questions for my Statistics exam, and when giving me the solutions, it was setting out its solutions impeccably in terms of structure and method. But even then I noticed it was making the odd minor mathematical error every now and then (of the ilk of 2+2=5) that I was having to correct, so I did inspect its answers thoroughly rather than just implicitly trust it. I also noticed it occasionally got probability questions wrong when I tried it with some our teacher had given us to revise with (initially without solutions, but then with solutions that vindicated my original convictions rather than ChatGPT’s solution).

I also have to give it that similarly to Statistics, it mostly calculated things like accuracy, precision, recall and confusion matrices quite well when I asked it to generate me exam questions and solutions for my Applied Machine Learning test.

For the Operational Research exam, though, it was utterly useless. It couldn’t do the Simplex Method to save its life!

 

[Alsty]

Looks like Google have fixed this now, but for a while it was telling people the swimming pool on the Titanic was not full of water

 

[NuttySquirrel]

Looks like Google have fixed this now, but for a while it was telling people the swimming pool on the Titanic was not full of water

"The crew didn't have time to refill the pool before the ship sank"

 

[Matt N]

I had an interesting one today.

We’ve recently started rewatching The Big Bang Theory, and ever since, my Facebook “suggested for you” posts have been filled with posts about TBBT and other comedy shows. I think I must have clicked on one once and then had them just keep popping up, as happens with these algorithms…

Eventually, this algorithm was led towards showing me posts about The Inbetweeners, for some reason (even though I’ve never properly watched it in full). Anyway, the generative AI fail I reference today was from Meta’s new AI tool that offers up answers to questions underneath some posts and videos.

One of the videos I saw was of two characters in the show discussing “European birds”… and Meta’s AI agent fires up lots of lovely questions and answers about European bird habitats and migration patterns! I haven’t watched much of The Inbetweeners, but from what I ascertained, that definitely wasn’t the type of “bird” the characters were talking about… AI clearly isn’t that clever with alternative word meanings just yet!

Another video had a character in the show referring to a memory of a female teacher bending down as being “stored in the visual w**k bank”, and one of Meta’s AI questions and answers was “what does stored in the visual w**k bank mean?”, with the suggested answer being “the character was referring to the memory being a happy one for them to reminisce about”!