Written by Adrian Holovaty on July 7, 2025
Well, here’s a weird one.
At Soundslice, our sheet music scanner digitizes music from photographs, so you can listen, edit and practice. We continually improve the system, and I keep an eye on the error logs to see which images are getting poor results.
In the last few months, I started noticing an odd type of upload in our error logs. Instead of images like this...
...we were starting to see images like this:
Um, that’s just a screenshot of a ChatGPT session...! WTF? Obviously that’s not music notation. It’s ASCII tablature, a rather barebones way of notating music for guitar.
Our scanning system wasn’t intended to support this style of notation. Why, then, were we being bombarded with so many ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was mystified for weeks — until I messed around with ChatGPT myself and got this:
Turns out ChatGPT is telling people to go to Soundslice, create an account and import ASCII tab in order to hear the audio playback. So that explains it!
Problem is, we didn’t actually have that feature. We’ve never supported ASCII tab; ChatGPT was outright lying to people. And making us look bad in the process, setting false expectations about our service.
So that raised an interesting product question. What should we do? We’ve got a steady stream of new users who’ve been told incorrect facts about our offering. Do we slap disclaimers all over our product, saying “Ignore what ChatGPT is saying about ASCII tab support”?
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