Inspired by ChatGPT’s Frequent Hallucinations About Music, the Founder of Soundslice Turns Vision into Reality
Earlier this month, Adrian Holovaty, the creator of the music-teaching platform Soundslice, uncovered a mystery that had been bothering him for weeks. Odd images that appeared to be ChatGPT sessions were repeatedly uploaded to the site.
Upon investigation, he realized that ChatGPT had inadvertently become a significant advocate for his company—though it was also giving users misleading information about the functionality of his app.
Holovaty is best known as one of the co-founders of the open-source Django project, a popular Python web development framework (although he stepped away from managing the project in 2014). In 2012, he launched Soundslice, which he proudly states remains “bootstrapped,” as he shared with TechCrunch. Currently, he is focusing on his music career as both an artist and entrepreneur.
Soundslice is a music education platform utilized by students and instructors alike. It features a video player that synchronizes with musical notations, helping users learn to play the notes.
Additionally, it includes a functionality called the “sheet music scanner,” which allows users to upload images of physical sheet music that AI then converts into an interactive format with notations.
Holovaty closely monitors the error logs related to this feature to identify problems and make improvements, he mentioned.
It was during this monitoring that he began to see the uploaded ChatGPT sessions.
These uploads produced numerous error logs. Rather than containing images of sheet music, they were filled with text and a series of symbols known as ASCII tablature—a simplified text-based system for guitar notations that uses a standard keyboard. (For instance, no standard QWERTY keyboard has a treble clef key.)
The surge of these ChatGPT session images wasn’t significant enough to financially impact his company or drain the app’s bandwidth, Holovaty noted. He felt puzzled, as he recounted in a blog post about the issue.
“Our scanning system wasn’t built to handle this form of notation. So why were we flooded with ASCII tab ChatGPT screenshots? I was confused for weeks—until I tried using ChatGPT myself.”
That’s when he realized ChatGPT was telling users they could listen to music by creating a Soundslice account and uploading those chat session images. However, it was not true; uploading those images would not convert the ASCII tab into audible notes.
A new issue arose. “The main concern was reputational: new Soundslice users were approaching us with unrealistic expectations. They had been confidently misled about what we could actually deliver,” he shared with TechCrunch.
He and his team considered their options: put disclaimers all over the site stating, “No, we can’t convert a ChatGPT session into music,” or develop that feature within the scanner, even though he had never envisioned supporting such atypical musical notation.
He opted to create the feature.
“I have mixed feelings about this. While I’m glad to introduce a tool that assists users, I feel somewhat compelled in a peculiar way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?” he expressed.
He also wondered if this was the first documented case of a company having to adapt a feature due to ChatGPT spreading inaccuracies to a large audience.
On Hacker News, fellow developers shared an interesting view: many likened it to an overly enthusiastic salesperson making grand claims, thus pressuring developers to create new features.
“I think that’s a very apt and amusing analogy!” Holovaty agreed.
