“We're literally rickrolling our customers.”
Head flies off
Folks, we have reached a new milestone in the uncanny valley: AI has started Rickrolling humans.
In a now-viral post on former Twitter user X, Flo Crivello, CEO of AI assistant company Lindy, explained how this strange meme situation, featuring Rick Astley's 1987 hit “Never Gonna Give You Up,” came about.
The company's AI assistants, known as “Lindy's,” are meant to help customers with a variety of tasks. Part of Lindy's job is to teach customers how to use the platform, but during this task, the AI helper provided links to video tutorials that didn't exist.
“A customer reached out to me requesting a video tutorial,” Crivello wrote in a now-viral tweet thread about the hilarious blunder. “Clearly Lindy was in charge of this and I was happy to see she sent me the video.”
“But then I realized there were no video tutorials,” he continued. “And then I realized Lindy was literally Rickrolling her customers.”
Crivello demonstrates that in a recording of the incident, the AI assistant did in fact provide the customer with a link to the “Never Gonna Give You Up” video, which is exactly how memers have been trolling each other for the better part of the last two decades.
A customer contacted me requesting a video tutorial.
Apparently it was Lindy who was in charge of this issue and I was happy to see that she sent me the video.
But then I remembered there were no video tutorials and realized Lindy was literally rickrolling our customers. pic.twitter.com/zsvGp4NsGz
— Flor Crivello (@Altimor) August 19, 2024
Training Day
The CEO and founder of Lindy told TechCrunch that while he's not entirely sure how it happened, he has a theory about how his AI assistant found a way to execute this particular piece of internet humor.
“These models try to predict the most likely next sequence of text,” Crivello explains. “So it starts with, 'Oh, I'm sending you a video!' So what's the most likely next thing? YouTube.com. What's the most likely next thing?”
Apparently the same thing happened at another time, but the CEO said in both the TechCrunch interview and on the X thread that the issue has since been fixed “for all Lindies.”
“What's really great about this new age of AI is that all we had to do to patch it in was add a line called a system prompt, which is a prompt that's included with every Lindy, which says don't rickroll,” he continued.
While the issue was ultimately harmless and easily fixed, we expect to see more and more of these hilarious errors in the future — and they'll likely get even weirder as AI companies continue to run out of training data.
More AI weirdness: Elon Musk's new AI has already been used to generate images of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris committing 9/11
