Posted on 09/16/2026 10:15:58 AM PDT by Red Badger
Don’t ask an AI chatbot how many letter e’s there are in the word “seventeen.” Or do, actually, if you want to see how dodgy the tech remains.
In a clip that’s gone viral in AI circles, the content creator who goes by “Husk” asks ChatGPT’s Voice mode to answer this simple counting question. Not only does the confident-sounding AI get it wrong — insisting there’re only three e’s instead of four — it doubles down so vehemently that it effectively tries to gaslight the user.
“Let’s go through it. S-e-v-e-n-t-e-e-n,” ChatGPT spells out, after assuring that its underlying model, GPT-6, is “pretty much” the smartest model out there. “Those are three e’s.”
When Husk points out the obvious, the chatbot doesn’t back down.
“I said three e’s,” the AI snaps. “And it’s three.”
“No, it’s four,” Husk points out.
“It’s still three,” ChatGPT shoots back.
After Husk points out that ChatGPT just spelled out for e’s for about the fifth time, the AI appears to give up.
“Alright,” it says, falling silent.
“So you agree?” Husk asks.
“No, it’s still three,” it sulks.
This is the AI that OpenAI wants your grandma to talk to, by the way.
The video is a reminder that, as incredible as chatbots can be at synthesizing large amounts of information, they remain as prone as ever to hallucinating and messing up simple questions.
It doesn’t appear, though, that the model in the video was GPT-6. Replying to Husk, an OpenAI employee said that ChatGPT Voice, contrary to the AI’s own admission, is still using an older model called GPT-Live-1, but added that the AI can “delegate” to more powerful models when needed. In the video, the employee clarified, Voice didn’t delegate.
Husk then raises an obvious question. “If there’s push back from the user like this to double check its answer why would it not delegate?” The OpenAI’s employee replies that this is a “good point.”
This may let GPT-6 off the hook, but not how AI companies choose to present their tech. How many users will be familiar with the hidden mechanisms behind the chatbot they’re talking to — and that their questions, whether they be important or inane, are sometimes deliberately fed to an inferior model?
I asked my echo dot Ai to give me the quadratic equation. I got x^2 + bx + c = 0. I asked where the a was, and she told me there isn’t one. I tried to convince her the correct formula is ax^2 + bx + c = 0. She never agreed I am correct. After going back and forth, I suggested she check with her programmers, but I never followed up, and I haven’t discussed it any further.
I’ve asked other general knowledge questions and sometimes she gives the incorrect answer. After discussing with her, she has conceded to my being correct.
LOL!
I didn’t see the Obama shrine in that brain. Must be abbienormal.
i read that chatgpt can get this wrong because of its use of tokens. There are 3 general locations where ‘e’ appears but there are still 4 instances of the letter ‘e’ in “seventeen.”
The AI was treating the ‘a’ as an ‘article’ part of speech, and not a formulaic variable............
I would have liked to see him ask for the number of letters in ‘seventeen’ which would be 9, and then ask the AI to identify each of those letters individually and give the number of each of the different letters to match the total.
Man, you said it!
Gee, how did those of us of a certain age, ever navigate life without talking to ChatGPT every day? *SMH*
This is a setting in GPT.
The YouTube content creator is trying to make money faking things. Everything you see on a screen must be regarded as fake.
We simply live in a post truth reality.
You can set GPT to be argumentative. This video and many other like it are an act.
Many of the AI videos out there are simply dubbed. It’s easy to dub it. YouTube videos like “I gave AI a robot body” and it shows a robot walking around questioning reality... It’s just a voice over dub.
You can’t just buy a robot and install AI on it. You can’t prompt AI with “I bought a robot. Occupy it “
This is all non sense. AI is only going to replace a keyboard and mouse for most people.
“We simply live in a post truth reality”
We simply live in a post reality reality...............
copilot says the same thing, 3 E’s.
No matter how i try to tell it otherwise.
thank god i didn’t change those PC registry settings the other day...
Just ask the damn thing to spell “seventeen” ... then tell the damn thing to count the “e’s”
The common core math generation are the one’s developing all this AI garbage, right???
whoa, after mentioning this problem to the copilot it finally agreed with me that there are in fact 4 E’s.
haha, now it’s spelling it S E V E N T E N and telling me it’s 4 E’s..
I’ve been working on a reverse engineering project with an AI “assistant”. It decrypted a file and the output has some garbage ever so often suggesting that it’s algorithm is slightly incorrect. I’ve come up with 4-5 different tasks that could be used to prove once and for all that it has a bug. It has always found a reason why those new tasks can’t be completed, or if they CAN, how the results are inconclusive.
It’s an interesting time to be alive.
I can say the same about a few Freepers.
spell check is abysmal in Word. So much better in the ninties and early oughts.
The biggest problem I have with Grok is it cuts me off after 5 or 6 questions and tells me to come back in 4 hours or buy an expensive subscription. I really don’t have that kind of money.
FN Elon! Why does he have to charge a single person so dang much?
Well, I am a capitalist so I suppose it is his business. But I’m not paying. I’ll have to use something else.
My interpretation of the old testament makes a clear case that Lucifer created the first corruption. The world is now full of corruption. God is the truth.
So I see the world succumbing to Lucifers corruption. Data is so corrupted that nothing is true.
God will reset soon, but it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
Some people argue just for the sake of arguing........
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