I really found this fascinating as I had thought that these type of problems of how many e's are in the word strawberry etc. were stopped but as this video shows, perhaps its just that this question of how many e's are in the word strawberry itself got part in the training data and so even a slight variation of asking it for seventeen makes it fumble. I had thought that this was a solved issue but actually it isn't which was a bit fascinating to see in this video, so much so that I had to test it out and I found out that AI still hallucinates and had the same result for the most part.

There is an old German joke from the comedy “Die Feuerzangenbowle”, where someone gives his name as “Pfeiffer, with 3 fs”, which is funny because it is robotically hypercorrect, since everybody knows the only necessary clarification is between “Pfeiffer” vs. “Pfeifer”, double-f vs. single f. So in a way “there are two rs in strawberry” is a very human “mistake”, because in any normal situation the asker is clearly interested in the “berry” part. This weird sycophancy, however, is entirely preposterous and hopefully just an artifact of some deliberate “the customer is always right” policy corporate tacked on, rather than a fundamental limitation of the technology.