Embarrassing AI #50: Claude hallucinated lyrics and lied

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This may come as a shock to you, but AI makes up things and then tries to memory hole its hallucinations with lies as excuses.

Who knew?!

I was testing the elevenlabs integration in my Ol’ 55 App. It’s supposed to sing the part of the song that is being practices on a particular day. This is what Claude said it could get it to do.

The reality is that all it does is read the lyrics instead of singing them, which completely misses the point of the integration.

But that’s not the lie. Sometimes the AI will think it can do something which ultimately doesn’t work. That’s cool and part of experimentation.

What isn’t cool is that it also created made up lyrics even though I had provided the music charts and lyrics to the song.

When I confronted it, Claude replied:

But when I looked at a bunch of other lessons, it had used the actual lyrics to the song.

Claude was lying its ass off.

Embarrassing.

Because I could show it that it was being inconsistent, and also telling it that I wasn’t planning to make money from a Tom Waits song, I convinced it to remove all the made up lyrics and replace it with actual ones.

This happens with AI sometimes. It will try to avoid doing something because of some hard coded restriction, but if you know how to coax it correctly, it will be able to construct reasoning solid enough to circumvent its programming.

It’s all part of the magic.

I submitted the app to a competition and made a loom to show how it works.

The loom is so mid that I don’t want to share it here.

Because it’s embarrassing.

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🧘‍♂ Last Word.

I got annoyed that Claude lied to me and then I remembered it’s not real.

Making daily progress,

P.S. Did I do something totally backwards today? Or do you have a better prompt for this? Hit reply and tell me. I’m here to learn just as much as you are. (I read every single email).