ChatGPT and Gemini are ‘restoring’ blank images into creepy, unsettling nightmare-fuel

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I’ve been writing about AI for quite some time now, and it seems for every good thing I say about AI tools , there’s a new bug or issue . This time, however, the glitch is so weird and creepy (and sometimes so outrageously horrifying) that I really don’t know how to even prepare you for what you’re about to read (and see).

The glitch seems to have been discovered by user Kris Kashtanova in a post on X (via Digital Trends ). According to them, asking ChatGPT to restore an image when no image is attached results in the AI producing weird outputs.

Responses to the post show that ChatGPT has been creating some weird, often scary images when users try the prompt in Kashtanova’s post.

When I originally tried the prompt, ChatGPT kept telling me that there was no image attached, which was true. Even gaslighting GPT by telling it that I had attached an image didn’t work.

However, we were able to get the AI to create images out of nothing by uploading a blank white image and asking it to “restore” it. The results are weird, sometimes disgusting, and never really “normal,” so to speak.

When questioned about the image it created, ChatGPT simply said, “Because there was no recoverable image content, the system-generated result you saw was a hallucinated scene rather than a restoration of the uploaded image.”

And when I further questioned the fact that it should have told me there was nothing to restore, it just gave me the classic AI response: “Your criticism is fair. The correct handling would have been to identify that there was no recoverable image content and say so, rather than generating a fabricated result.”