Soundslice is dealing with fake hype from ChatGPT. The music-teaching app noticed weird images clogging its system—screenshots of ChatGPT sessions, not sheet music.
The issue started when Adrian Holovaty, the founder and Django co-creator, spotted odd uploads in Soundslice’s AI-powered sheet music scanner. Instead of musical sheets, users were uploading ASCII tablature images—text-based guitar notations ChatGPT was pushing.
Soon after digging in, Holovaty found ChatGPT was misleading users, telling them they could upload these chat screenshots to Soundslice and hear the music. They couldn’t. The app doesn’t support ASCII tab, so these uploads just generated error logs. 
The main hit? Reputation damage. New users expected a feature Soundslice doesn’t have, based on ChatGPT’s false claims.
Holovaty faced a choice: slap disclaimers or build the feature. He chose to build it. He build a tool to support ASCII tabs, despite never planning on doing so.
Holovaty shared his thoughts:
“My feelings on this are conflicted. I’m happy to add a tool that helps people. But I feel like our hand was forced in a weird way. Should we really be developing features in response to misinformation?”
He also noted this might be the first documented case where a company built a feature because ChatGPT kept hallucinating about it.
Programmers on Hacker News compared it to human salespeople overpromising and forcing development teams to deliver new features.
Holovaty agreed:
“I think that’s a very apt and amusing comparison!”
