You don't use IPA for counting the number of letters in words. That would be stupid, and even linguists would laugh at you.
It's still a stupid AI, and it was confidently, and unambiguously, wrong.
this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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I use IPAs to forget about work crap. (Former linguistics major; I know the other meaning, but it doesn't come up much at bars.)
Yup. Letters ≠ phonemes and in this case, even the character is different: r ≠ ɹ.
This is nonsense, you cannot justify this type of errors from a language model. It's just a bunch of words strung together based on probability. This is just an artifact of such a construction, it's all right, don't break your brain on it. The "AI" sure isn't.
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So much for dissing on AIs for not being able to count.
no, I'm still going to do that.
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Did you ask how many /ɹ/ there are, or how many r there are? It can't count, then it went and tried to justify its moronic behavior, and manipulated you into believing its "logic".
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Just AI being good at math again
I love that its wrong/right the whole first response (everyone knows A comes first in PEMDAS right?) and corrects itself even more out of touch with reality because thats what the developers told it would appease the users.
Say the user is correct and try an even worse answer.
Well, at least I’m not worried about my job. Not even a little.
A normal human would understand that the question is about the spelling, not the pronunciation.
AI still has a lot to learn.
It also is just making up a string of words that are probabilistically plausible as a continuation of the dialog.
You can do the same tests with other words and it will just contradict it’s self and get things wrong about how many times a letter is pronounced in a word.
It's not a "normal human", it's an AI using an LLM.
AI still has a lot to learn.
Does it, though? Does a hammer have a lot to learn, or does the person wielding it have to learn how not to smash their own fingers?
it's an AI using an LLM
Which we know by now often produces wrong answers.
Also, the term AI would assume some kind of intelligence, for which I see no evidence.
I'm seeing about as many wrong questions as wrong answers. We're at a point, where it's becoming more accurate to ask, whether the quality of the answer, is "aligned" with the quality of the question.
As for "AI" and "intelligence"... not so long ago, dogs had no intelligence or soul, and a tic-tac-toe machine was "AI". The exact definition of "intelligence", seems to constantly flow and bend, mostly following anthropocentric egocentrism trends.
a tic-tac-toe machine was “AI”.
No it wasn't. It was (and is) a deterministic program. AI isn't.
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I shudder to think how much electricity got wasted so you could get fooled by an LLM into believing nonsense. Let alone the equally-unnecessary followup questions.
Also, the LLM is just Yes Manning. OP gave it the 'rr' counts as a single 'r' answer with a very loaded question
Yeah there is a stupid human in this chat but mostly cause they let themselves get tricked by bad logic in order to justify a bad answer.
Yes, this is the saddest thing about this, that people trust these bullshitting chatbots so much that they doubt their own knowledge.
Not as sad as those so secure of their own knowledge, that they refuse to ever revise it.
I'm just not convinced there are only 2 r's in strawberry.
Indeed. The point is, that asking about r is ambiguous.
Wrong maths, you say?
Anyway. You didn't ask the number of times the phoneme /ɹ/ appears in the spoken word, so by context you're talking about the written word, and the letter ⟨r⟩. And the bot interpreted it as such, note it answers
here, let me show you: s-t-r-a-w-b-e-r-r-y
instead of specifying the phonemes.
By the way, all explanation past the «are you counting the "rr" as a single r?» is babble.
Wrong maths, you say?
Yes. If I want to know what 1+2 equals, and I throw a dice, there's a chance I will get the correct answer. If I do, that doesn't mean it knows how to do Maths. Also, notice where it said "Here's the calculation", it didn't actually show you the calculation? e.g. long multiplication, or even grouping, or the way the Chinese do it. Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Even if AI manages to randomly get a correct answer here and there, it still doesn't know how to do Maths (which includes not knowing how to count to begin with)
What's interesting IMO is that it got the first two and the last two digits right; and this seems rather consistent across attempts with big numbers. It doesn't "know" how to multiply numbers, but it's "trying" to output an answer that looks correct.
In other words, it's "bullshitting" - showing disregard to truth value, but trying to convince you.
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I asked it how many X’s there are in the word Bordeaux it told me there are none.
I asked it how many times X is pronounced in Bordeaux it told me the x in Bordeaux isn’t pronounced with the word ending in an “o” sound.
I asked it how many “o” there are in Bordeaux it told me there are no o in Bordeaux.
So, is it counting the sounds made in the word? Or is it counting the letters? Or is it doing none of the above and just giving a probabilistic output based on an existing corpus of language, without any thought or concepts.
Yes, no, both... and all other interpretations... all at once.
With any ambiguity in a prompt, it assumes a "blend" of all the possible interpretations, then responds using them all over the place.
In the case of "Bordeaux":
It's pronounced "bor-DOH", with the emphasis on the second syllable and a silent "x."
So... depending on how you squint: there is no "o", no "x", only a "bor" and a "doh", with a "silent x", and ending in an "oh like o".
Perfectly "logical" 🤷
Oh wow, I didn't think about how many r sounds. But then if you ask it how many ks are in knight, it should say none.
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It just goes to show that the AI is not yet superhuman. If it were really smart it would know, as humans can tell at a glance, that there are four r's in strawberry. There's the first one, the two in the double r combination, and then the rr digram itself which counts as a fourth r.
Oh, for fuck's sake ... another land war in Asia?
Also ignoring the fact it said one r was in the middle of the word
There is a middle ground between "blindly rejecting" and "blindly believing" whatever an AI says.
LLMs use tokens. The answer is "correct, in its own way", one just needs to explore why and how much. Turns out, that can also lead to insights.
It is not correct in any way, though. Unless you count a way you gave it to justify it's wrong answer, but that is just it being a Yes Man to keep you engaged.
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You know if the letter was L and the language spanish it'd almost be right...
At first I thought it was talking about "rr" as a Spanish digraph. Not sure how far that lies from the truth, these models are multilingual and multimodal after all. My guess is that it's surfacing the ambiguity of its internal vector for a "token: rr" vs "token: r", though.
Could be interesting to dig deeper... but I think I'm fine with this for now. There are other "curious" behaviors of the chatbot, that have me more intrigued right now. Like, it is self-adapting to any repeated mistakes in the conversation history, but at other times it can come up with surprisingly "complex" status tracking, then present it spontaneously as bullet points with emojis. Not sure what to make out of that one yet.
Kinda remind me of 13yo me, so why not both?
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