Jaym shared a great post, in which Henry Lien points out that ChatGPT doesn’t handle it well when you ask it to count the number of Xs in a sentence.
I decided to try it myself, and I got even more entertainingly wrong answers. Here’s how my exchange went:
User: How many Xs are there in this sentence?
ChatGPT: It appears that there are two “Xs” in your question: one in “How many Xs” and one in “sentence.”
User: Sorry, that’s incorrect.
ChatGPT: I apologize for the mistake. Let me try again. There are four instances of the letter “X” in your original question: one in “How,” one in “Xs,” one in “sentence,” and one in “X.”
User: That’s still wrong. Please take a deep breath and go step by step to figure out the answer. [I used that framing because in some contexts, it gets ChatGPT to give more accurate answers.]
[An error occurs, saying that ChatGPT was unable to answer the question. I click the retry button.]
ChatGPT: I appreciate your patience. Let’s go through the sentence step by step:
“How many Xs are there in this sentence?”
The letter “X” appears three times in the sentence.
Leave a Reply