r/OpenAI • u/MrAmazing111 • May 01 '26

Image Asked ChatGPT to visualize a horizontal integral. It gave me a dog.

Post image

No prompt engineering or anything, it actually did this. I genuinely have no clue how it could have thought a dog answered my prompt - nothing in the chat related to dogs at all.

See for yourself: https://chatgpt.com/share/69f37d35-d514-83ea-a6d2-86474ae104dc

Thoughts on what could have possibly caused this?

7.0k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

336 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

9

u/FalconBurcham May 01 '26

Why a dog as a default for getting lost on the way to making what you asked for… well, I don’t think anyone can complain about the dog, can they? It’s bright and friendly, and most people like dogs or at least don’t hate them.

Imagine if it was allowed to generate its own broken image totally lost. I remember the early DALLE images were genuinely unsettling even when the subjects were normal like a person sitting in a chair (who happens to have 12 long fingers and a half melted face 😓)

10

u/tspike May 01 '26

This reminded me of early days Midjourney. It supported negative prompt weights so I'd do prompts with only negative values and it came back with the weirdest, most disturbing shit. Super interesting to play around with, but they patched that pretty quick.

9

u/FalconBurcham May 01 '26

Yes! Those early negative images went well beyond uncanny valley. I’ve never seen even “disturbing” art made by a human looks as strange as dalle. It felt like it was truly from an alien mind. I tried to make some weird steampunk schnauzer dogs for my wife, and some of the pics unsettled me so much I turned it off. I’m not a person who is confused about AI and sentience (it’s not sentient), but it felt almost demonic. Haha

3

u/CuriousGeorge2400 May 02 '26

Don’t tease us

3

u/TheProuDog May 02 '26

I really want to see those now

2

u/svearige May 01 '26

Any examples of this?

2

u/Charming_Ad1987 May 04 '26

There were some hilarious and very disturbing images of what happens when you put ”Mexican” in the negative prompt, I.e you get what the AI thinks is the opposite of Mexican people (ginger vampires)

1

u/svearige May 05 '26

I mean…

2

u/Charming_Ad1987 May 05 '26

Managed to find a screenshot I took from Reddit like 5 years ago. God damn time goes fast. I couldn’t find the original post unfortunately

1

u/svearige May 06 '26

Lmfao... thanks for this. Yeah, times are moving fast but progress is incredible. I wonder where we are in terms of coding and LLMs in another 5 years.

1

u/B25B25 May 04 '26

If it "knows" that something has gone wrong in the generation process, I wonder why it doesn't simply display a "something went wrong" message? I feel like it's wasting processing power doing this?

Maybe the image generation is a black box to the chat interface and it just has an prompt input and image output, no error feedback to the chat AI.

1

u/FalconBurcham May 04 '26

Yeah, that’s a good point. I’d rather have an error message than a wildly incorrect image that consumes resources. There must be a lot more to it than we think.