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We've reached a new milestone in the uncanny valley, folks: AIs are now Rickrolling humans.
In a now-viral post on X-formerly-Twitter, Flo Crivello, the CEO of the AI assistant firm Lindy, explained how this bizarre memetic situation featuring Rick Astley's 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up" came to pass.
Known as "Lindys," the company's AI assistants are intended to help customers with various tasks. Part of a Lindy's job is to teach clients how to use the platform, and it was during this task that the AI helper provided a link to a video tutorial that wasn't supposed to exist.
"A customer reached out asking for video tutorials," Crivello wrote in his now-viral tweet thread about the hilarious debacle. "We obviously have a Lindy handling this, and I was delighted to see that she sent a video."
"But then I remembered we don't have a video tutorial," he continued, "and realized Lindy is literally fucking [R]ickrolling our customers."
In a screen-recording of the incident, Crivello further demonstrates that the AI assistant did indeed provide the customer with a link to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video, which is exactly how memers for the better part of the last two decades have trolled each other.
A customer reached out asking for video tutorials.
We obviously have a Lindy handling this, and I was delighted to see that she sent a video.
But then I remembered we don't have a video tutorial and realized Lindy is literally fucking rickrolling our customers. pic.twitter.com/zsvGp4NsGz
— Flo Crivello (@Altimor) August 19, 2024
Training Day
Though he's not entirely sure how it happened, the Lindy CEO and founder told TechCrunch that he has a theory about how his AI assistants figured out how to execute this specific brand of internet humor.
"The way these models work is they try to predict the most likely next sequence of text," Crivello explained. "So it starts like, 'Oh, I’m going to send you a video!' So what’s most likely after that? YouTube.com. And then what’s most likely after that?"
Apparently the same thing had occurred another time, though the CEO noted in both his TechCrunch interview and in his X thread that the issue has since been patched "across all Lindies."
"The really remarkable thing about this new age of AI is, to patch it, all I had to do was add a line for what we call the system prompt — which is the prompt that’s included in every Lindy — and it’s like, don’t Rickroll people," he continued.
While this issue was ultimately innocuous and easy to fix, we're likely to see more and more of this sort of humorous error — and as AI firms continue running out of training data, it's likely going to get a lot weirder, too.
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