Earlier this month, Adrian Holovaty, founder of music-teaching platform Soundslice, solved a mystery that had been plaguing him for weeks. Weird images of what were clearly ChatGPT sessions kept being uploaded to the site.
Once he solved it, he realized that ChatGPT had become one of his company’s greatest hype men – but it was also lying to people about what his app could do.
Holovaty is best known as one of the creators of the open-source Django project, a popular Python web development framework (though he retired from managing the project in 2014). In 2012, he launched Soundslice, which remains “proudly bootstrapped,” he tells TechCrunch. Currently, he’s focused on his music career both as an artist and as a founder.
Soundslice is an app for teaching music, used by students and teachers. It’s known for its video player synchronized to the music notations that guide users on how the notes should be played.
It also offers a feature called “sheet music scanner” that allows users to upload an image of paper sheet music and, using AI, will automatically turn that into an interactive sheet, complete with notations.
Holovaty carefully watches this feature’s error logs to see what problems occur, where to add improvements, he said.
That’s where he started seeing the uploaded ChatGPT sessions.
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They were creating a bunch of error logs. Instead of images of sheet music, these were images of words and a box of symbols known as ASCII tablature. That’s a basic text-based system used for guitar notations that uses a regular keyboard. (There’s no treble key, for instance, on your standard QWERTY keyboard.)
Image Credits:Adrian Holovaty
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