Hallucination as inspiration: Music platform creates new feature after AI chatbot falsely advertises capability

Soundslice has developed a new ASCII tablature import feature after discovering that ChatGPT was falsely telling users the sheet music platform already supported this text-based guitar notation format. The incident represents what may be the first documented case of a company building functionality specifically in response to an AI model’s hallucination, raising questions about how businesses should handle AI-generated misinformation about their products.

What happened: Adrian Holovaty, co-founder of Soundslice, noticed unusual activity in the company’s error logs where users were submitting screenshots of ChatGPT conversations containing ASCII tablature instead of typical sheet music uploads.

• When Holovaty tested ChatGPT himself, he discovered the AI was instructing users to create Soundslice accounts and use the platform to import ASCII tabs for audio playback—a feature that had never existed.
• “We’ve never supported ASCII tab; ChatGPT was outright lying to people,” Holovaty wrote. “And making us look bad in the process, setting false expectations about our service.”
• The company’s scanning system wasn’t designed to handle this text-based guitar notation format, which represents guitar music as strings with numbers indicating fret positions.

The bigger picture: This case highlights how AI hallucinations can create unexpected market pressures for businesses when chatbots confidently present false information about their services.

• AI models like ChatGPT generate false information through “confabulation,” where they statistically improvise to fill knowledge gaps rather than admitting uncertainty.
• Previous AI hallucinations have typically caused problems—lawyers faced sanctions for submitting ChatGPT-generated citations to non-existent court cases, and Air Canada was ordered to honor a bereavement fare policy that was hallucinated by their support chatbot.

From problem to solution: Rather than simply posting disclaimers, Soundslice chose to meet the artificial demand by actually building the feature.

• “We ended up deciding: what the heck, we might as well meet the market demand,” Holovaty explained.
• The team built an ASCII tab importer—a feature that had been “near the bottom of my ‘Software I expected to write in 2025’ list”—and updated their user interface to inform users about the new capability.

What the founder thinks: Holovaty expressed conflicted feelings about developing features in response to AI misinformation.

• “I’m happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?” he wrote.
• The situation raises philosophical questions about product development and whether companies should adapt to false AI-generated expectations about their services.

Context on Soundslice: The platform typically digitizes sheet music from photos or PDFs and syncs the notation with audio or video recordings, allowing musicians to see the music scroll by as they hear it played, with tools for slowing down playback and practicing difficult passages.