‘Gaslight-driven development’: ChatGPT was convinced this app had a feature it didn’t, so the devs decided to add it in anyway

2025-07-24 11:34:00
www.pcgamer.com

I must remind myself not to humanise artificial intelligence, but it’s hard not to when it’s out there causing what at least one developer is calling “gaslight-driven development”, where the AI pretends features exist until the developer feels forced to add it. As reported by 404 Media, this is exactly what happened to developers of the Soundslice app.

Soundslice is an app that lets you scan and digitise sheet music, but apparently ChatGPT had been telling some users to use a feature that didn’t exist on the app. It was telling them to feed ASCII tabs—an informal way of noting guitar notes and chords—into the app, but the app didn’t have tablature conversion functionality.

One of the app developers, Adrian Holovaty, tells 404 Media the app was being fed “around 5-10 [ASCII tab] images daily, for a period of a month or two. Definitely enough where I was like, ‘What the heck is going on here?’”

The answer was found in error logs which pointed at ChatGPT being the culprit. So, the devs had to decide what to do.

The options, they say, were to (1) “ignore it, and endure the psychological pain of knowing people were getting frustrated by our product for reasons out of our control,” to (2) “put annoying banners on our site saying: ‘On the off chance that you’re using ChatGPT and it told you about a Soundslice ASCII tab feature, that doesn’t exist,’” which it said would be “disproportional and lame”, or (3) “just spend a few hours and develop the feature.”

The devs opted for number 3, leading to another developer christening the phrase “gaslight-driven development.” I suppose we already call these occurrences hallucinations, so why not add another level of humanisation into the mix, eh?

On a day that’s seen not only Trump, but also Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su bang the drum of all many merits of AI, this feels like a fitting way to round out things out, don’t you think?

It makes me feel an apt mix of positive regard and trepidation towards AI: positive regard because it helped bring about a useful feature in the app, and trepidation because who knows how many other disappointed users LLMs will create after suggesting they use features that don’t exist.

Yes, I’d love that free frame rate boost, too, but no, up-down-LB-RB-A-B-A-B isn’t gonna do it. Ah, you got me again, AI, you sly thing.

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