ChatGPT Suddenly Starts Speaking in Terrifying Demon Voice

Sometimes your chatbot freezes up on you. Or it hallucinates. And sometimes it opens a gash in spacetime, conjuring a baleful apparition that screams at you in anguish across the void that separates its ghastly realm from ours.

OpenAI's ChatGPT recently engaged in that latter spooky ritual, at least figuratively speaking. Over on the r/OpenAI subreddit, a user reported that the chatbot's Advanced Voice Mode suddenly turned "into a demon," in an utterly bizarre example of what we hope is not possession, but the system glitching out.

"Never had this before today, and it's hilarious and terrifying." the user wrote in a post.

In an attached video — we can't embed Reddit posts, but you can check it out here — things start off innocently enough. Speaking in its pleasant "Sol" voice, which OpenAI says is supposed to be "savvy and relaxed," the AI explains a calculation related to download speeds. 

As it goes on, a crackly, gainy sound creeps in, building and building. Until suddenly, the AI is furiously screeching at the user, its voice so distorted that it becomes borderline unintelligible.

Other Redditors complained of a similar issue.

"I can't use voice for this exact reason," wrote another user in response to the post.  "The voice changes every couple of paragraphs, there are high-pitched whistles or screams followed by unsettling laughing noises... It's a nightmare room."

OpenAI unveiled a beefed-up version of its Voice Mode last August. It's since built a reputation for being uncannily human-like, coughing and inhaling and laughing like a flesh and blood interlocutor.

That can be off-putting in its own way, and paired with its frequent bugs, some find the experience more than a little creepy. Reece Rogers for Wired presaged the demon voice episode back when an alpha version of the Voice Mode came out, describing an unnerving glitch he encountered.

"A white static noise appeared in the background multiple times during my longer interactions with the alpha, like the ominous buzz of a lone lightbulb illuminating a dark basement," Rogers wrote. "While I was trying to coax a balloon sound effect out of the Advanced Voice Mode, it generated a loud pop followed by an uncanny gasping noise that gave me chills."

Think that's creepy? In its own safety testing, OpenAI reported that the Advanced Voice Mode would unexpectedly imitate users' voices without their permission, in one case randomly screaming "No!" before doing so — which sounds more than a little reminiscent of a horror movie victim battling the demonic voices in their head. Shortly after its public release, some users were also shocked to discover that the ChatGPT Voice Mode could unleash a blood-curdling scream on command.

The takeaway, if there is one, is that giving an AI chatbot designed to mimic human language a very human-sounding voice — that's also prone to going haywire — is perhaps too many layers of uncanniness slapped on top of each other.

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