ChatGPT does not cease to surprise.

As I had described in my previous post (Plugin’ into superpowers), I have been playing with some of the plugins that are now available to use with ChatGPT4, In this post I describe my experience in playing with a plugin titled Video Insights. Video Insights is described as a plugin that allows you to “Interact with online video platforms like Youtube or Daily Motion.”

To test out this plugin I shared a link to a YouTube video of a talk I had given, recently, at Brigham Young University. With just the YouTube address, and no prompting on my part, ChatGPT4 (with the help of the plugin) began giving me an abstract of the talk.

As it happens, the first summary it generated was completely and utterly wrong. Hallucination of the highest order. It performed much better when I asked to regenerate. The second time around, it came up with a pretty good description / summary of the video (that I am linking to here).

I then asked it to create a transcript of the video. This is of interest to me, since I would love to get better and cleaner transcripts of YouTube videos (particularly for the videos we create for the Silver Lining for Learning webinar/podcast). Once again the first couple of responses were clearly hallucinatory in nature – and not connected, in any way, to the video that it had been linked to. Over and over, just spewing a completely random sentences that were completely unrelated to the video I had shared.

So, instead of trying to get it to regenerate one more time, I explicitly told it that what it was typing was NOT related to the talk in the video.

It is here that things took a totally unexpected turn. Below is a transcript of that part of the conversation.

Me: This is not Punya’s talk

Chat GPT: Used Video Insights

I apologize for the confusion, but it seems there was a mix-up with the video IDs. The transcript you received is for the music video “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley, not Punya Mishra’s talk. Let’s try again to get the correct transcript.

Please provide the correct YouTube link for Punya Mishra’s talk.

WT*. Did I just get RickRolled by ChatGPT!

How crazy is that!

A bit of research revealed to me what was really going on.

For the record, here is a screenshot of the conversation, just in case you think I was just hallucinating!

Postscript: I am not sure this plugin is all that interesting or useful. I think it is working from the close-captioning transcript auto-generated by YouTube, not the video itself, which is why it can come up with an abstract/summary (since it is essentially working with text) but fails miserably when asked to create a transcript from the actual video.