ChatGPT terrible at generating "guitar tabs"

[prisma spruce]

For those not familiar, guitar tablature (guitar tab) is a fairly simple music notation used by guitar players as an alternative to traditional sheet music that crudely describes how to play melodies and songs simply by illustrating the specific strings and frets to pick. It is frankly quite simple, and ChatGPT seems to believe it understands it, and will happily generate tabs on request, however, its answers are almost always completely wrong, spectacularly wrong, even for the simplest prompts.

The attached image is just one very simple example, but I have found that virtually any request for generating a tab fails, and I quickly get into back and forth messages of ChatGPT simply agreeing its answers are wrong, apologizing, and then trying again, but only making the same or progressively worse blunders. I find this quite fascinating based on all my other experiences in other problem domains, which seem to be orders of magnitude more difficult and complex, which ChatGPT is able to handle brilliantly (such as being able to write complex algorithms in every programming language i could think of).

I am a huge fan of ChatGPT and it absolutely incredible and world changing, which is why it seems so odd that it simply cannot handle this particular, seemly trivially problem domain. Very curious on others thoughts on the topic. Also, if anyone is interested in more examples and details, let me know!

@alpine jackal

[prisma spruce]

ChatGPT terrible at generating "guitar tabs"

[remote wigeon]

usually as the AI is trained on old data, if GPT did learn wrongly that said data (in this case the guitar tabs) what will happen is a wrong output with the inability to fix the it, it happens not only with this argument but with some others as well, the AI as of now does not have the ability to learn while in chat, i'll do an example, i did feed ask the AI information about the release date of FFXIV:Endwalker, he said the old date (before the delay) after telling that he was wrong and updated his info manually giving him sources (while citing those sources), it will try to assimilate that info but to no avail as the AI is not able to assimilate it, that's just one of the examples that i can make, there are many more cases out there

[golden musk]

What's the use of trying to get guitar tabs from chatGPT? It can't specifically analyze it and make a song just from guitar tabs

Even if it was trained off a large majority of guitar tabs it'd still output terrible guitar tabs, since GPT models are text predictors only knowing but not understanding

[prisma spruce]

thanks for you reply! while i am myself a seasoned software engineer, only just started playing with ChatGPT so i’m very new to the scene so please forgive me for asking “dumb” or repeat questions that the rest of you already have a firm grasp on.

one of the things i still find perplexing through my lengthy “interrogation” of the system is that it appears it has a firm grasp on essentially all of the core concepts (and seemingly the more difficult things to appear to master).

for instance, it knows very well all the notes which comprise all the scales in any key, and furthermore, it has no trouble identifying any note associated with any prompt asking “what note plays at X fret on Y string?” — how then can it fail a simple prompt “what is the tab for just the first 5 notes in A major? i even specified the starting note/string/fret (key of A, start with A, and exactly where to play it (5th fret of the first string [low e])

this prompt narrows the options tremendously. of course, dumb solutions would still technically work, jumping octaves, playing other places on the neck… and, i’d not even complain if that’s what it did…. but what it did was add notes not in the key/scale at all! which leaves me scratching my head, because it knows 1. all the notes associated with every string/fret of the whole guitar , and it also surely knows all the notes contained in every scale in every key. AI isn’t even needed to get the right answer; a relational SQL db from 1992 could do it no problem.

so what gives? the only thing i can think of is that guitar tabs out in the wild are notoriously crappy… but to be honest, i’ve never seen one THAT bad!

and yet, (even though it said it couldn’t, i tricked ChatGPT to write be a linux bash to play the second riff from Master of Puppets using the PC speaker! i just want to understand more about the inner workings of this amazing tech!

PS: as i was writing this i saw a few replies come though, thank you! and sorry if i covered anything already covered in one of those! it is way past my bed time though, so im going to catch up and reply as appropriate tomorrow!
thanks everyone so much!!!!

goodnight, Henry

[golden musk]

It's okay to ask dumb questions, it's only your curiousity talking after all

[surreal agate]

@prisma spruce default or legacy mode?

Because legacy mode is 3x smarter

[prisma spruce]

not sure; i just used the version on the website

[surreal agate]

You need plus for legacy