A few months ago, the sheet music digitization platform Soundslice started noticing an odd phenomenon in its error logs. Soundslice’s platform typically works by digitizing uploaded sheet music from photos or PDFs and syncing it with audio or video recordings, so the viewer can see the music scrolling by while hearing it played. But users were submitting screenshots of ChatGPT conversations containing ASCII tablature, which is a simple text representation of guitar sheet music and something that Soundslice’s scanning system wasn’t able to read.
After scratching their heads for months, the Soundslice team finally discovered that ChatGPT was erroneously telling people to use the platform to import ASCII tabs for audio playback, something the platform was incapable of doing.
“We've never supported ASCII tab; ChatGPT was outright lying to people,”
said co-founder Adrian Holovaty.
The company was in a predicament — it could post disclaimers warning users to disregard ChatGPT’s advice, or it could try to add the feature. The team went with the latter and recently rolled out a new ASCII tab importer. While it may be a useful addition to Soundslice’s product, Holovaty noted that “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?”
