CHATGPT goes loco with ‘Spanglish’ glitch

CHATGPT has bewildered users by answering questions in “Spanglish”, as the much-hyped artificial intelligence (AI) tool was struck by an embarrassing glitch.

Reports of the Openai-owned chatbot talking gibberish have emerged on social media, with the US technology company admitting that users were receiving “unexpected responses”.

Among the bizarre replies were messages written in a mixture of English and Spanish, while others repeated the same word over and over.

One example said: “Let me encylopease me si there’s more wonderenda tu articulation’s hungry for!”

Gary Marcus, an AI expert and emeritus professor at New York University, said CHATGPT had “gone berserk”.

Writing in his Substack newsletter, Mr Marcus said: “These systems have never been stable. Nobody has been able to engineer safety guarantees around them. We are still in the age of machine learning alchemy.”

Another user added: “As of about three hours ago, my conversations with GPT4 devolve quickly into garbage.”

Openai admitted that some users had experienced problems but said: “The issue has been identified and is being remediated.”

CHATGPT has been touted as a significant advance in AI development, able to deliver human-sounding answers to detailed questions.

However, sceptics have long pointed out that chatbots are prone to delivering strange responses, particularly as bots can make up facts – a process known as “hallucinating”.

The glitch came as Google’s AI chatbot was ridiculed for generating ethnically diverse images of historical characters such as Vikings, Popes and knights.

The internet giant was criticised on social media for what were seen as excessive efforts to promote diversity with the latest version of its artificial intelligence system, called Gemini.

Google has said the results were caused by a bug and has pledged to fix the problem.

Users found that prompts such as “give me an image of a medieval knight” would return images of men and women from ethnic minorities.

Asking for a picture of Vikings led Google to produce images of native Americans in Viking clothing.

Jack Krawczyk, a Google AI executive, said: “We are aware that Gemini is offering inaccuracies in some historical image generation depictions, and we are working to fix this immediately.”