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 think that is really good but here again I am amazed that something like Word through such varied individual contributions ought to have one of the best AI based lexicons in the world.
Clearly Microsoft has not accomplished that at all.
I use DuckAI and it has no problem admitting it was wrong.
Not worried. All of my answers are correct.
I do have a blue check mark as its for my business, but I too get limited to maybe 20-50 questions? But then again maybe its more. One thing you could try is to change the options like “think harder,” or Fast Reply, etc. see if you get a few more questions. I have done thagt with success but maybe because of the exgtra $8/month I pay for the b lue check mark?
Yes, I think that’s the reason.
I had the following conversation with DuckAI, which got the number of Es in seventeen correct, and when I congratulated it - it said it was easy to miss the second E in teen - which seems odd to me.
Here’s the conversation:
DuckAI: “Thanks—easy to miss the consecutive “ee” near the end. “Seventeen” has four E’s.
Me: I wonder if there is something about the way an AI thinks that makes the double Es easy to miss. As a human, I would expect those to be the easiest to spot.
DuckAI: Yes—there’s a real reason. Language models usually don’t inspect a word character by character the way a human does. They process text as tokens—often chunks that may represent parts or the whole of a word—and generate the most likely continuation based on learned patterns.
That works extremely well for meaning and fluent language, but exact tasks like counting letters require a different procedure: spelling the word out, aligning each character, and tallying them.
I think the video is AI generated and complete baloney.
Bookmark.
not sure I believe it. I have never used chatgpt, mostly I use the google bot unless I need some specific specialty
if the google bot made that mistake, which I doubt it would go oh I am so sorry I made a mistake and this is why...
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