When I first started using ChatGPT 4, I directed it to an uploaded PDF containing an image. I asked if it could “see” it, and it said it could. It even gave me a decent description of what it saw. Really impressive!

But then after a bit it told me something completely wrong about the uploaded image, and I asked it, “Are you REALLY looking at the image?” It said it wasn’t, and apologized for the “confusion”, and admitted it had no image processing capabilities.

It was able to describe the image fairly accurately because it already had information about it I had uploaded in text form. It relied on THAT data, but pretended it was getting it from the image file. WTH?

This happens A LOT with ChatGPT. It says it’s doing something, reading a web page, looking at an image, reading a PDF, whatever, and it just isn’t. You need to always be on your toes with this thing to make sure it’s not hallucinating/confabulating/lying.