ChatGPT provides 'cursed' results when asked for crochet creations

An artificial intelligence craze has been generated by the stratospheric ascent of ChatGPT, fueling worries that the technology may destroy jobs, search engines, and educational institutions. Yet, internet producers have found one industry that is still untouched by computers: fiber arts. In a report, The Guardian reported that various TikTok users have used ChatGPT to compose crochet patterns, producing "cursed" outcomes that are pushing the limits of developing artificial intelligence skills. 

Alexandra Woolner, a TikTok member who has been knitting for years and crocheting since 2019, came up with the idea in January to utilise ChatGPT to create a stuffed animal. She first asked it to create a narwhal pattern.

'Crochet Monstrosity'

A common crochet pattern is similar to coding in that it has punctuation and abbreviations to indicate the development process. For instance, "sc" stands for "single crochet," whereas "ch" stands for "chain". In the meanwhile, brackets [] are used to demarcate repeatable phases in the instructions, and an asterisk (*) denotes that an instruction should be repeated.

The fact that ChatGPT returned thorough instructions that matched a common pattern astounded Woolner. They produced what was referred to as an "AI-generated narhwal crochet monstrosity" by precisely following the pattern. Despite the product's frightening anatomical details, Woolner said it was fascinating that the language-learning programme produced a pattern that truly resulted in a sea monster.

'It's a weird mix, kind of an uncanny valley'

“The consensus among people who have seen it is that it looks wrong and ugly, but also very cute,” they said. “It came out shockingly very accurate while still being very, very wrong. It’s a weird mix, kind of an uncanny valley.” The response online has been overwhelmingly positive, according to Woolner, who noted that the initial video had close to 900,000 views and that following tries garnered tens of thousands more.

Woolner is not the only artist to investigate the possible crochet-based ChatGPT applications. Crocheting has long eluded mechanical replication due to its unpredictable and erratic stitching, according to Lily Lanario, a crocheter from London, who was motivated to investigate ChatGPT crocheting applications.

With varied degrees of success and accuracy, Lanario asked ChatGPT to create a number of patterns, including a cat, a duck, and a Pikachu. She claimed that she discovered the tool had some ability to fix poorly generated patterns, revising the instructions when she requested modifications like changing the colours or inserting a missing body section.

ChatGPT is poor at Math

According to Jessica Newman, director of the artificial intelligence security effort at UC Berkeley's Center for Long Term Cybersecurity, crochet patterns are particularly difficult for AI to comprehend since they mainly rely on numbers, a dataset type that AI suffers with more than words. As a huge language model of artificial intelligence, ChatGPT is trained on sizable text datasets to mimic human speech by foreseeing the words that will likely follow one another. These abilities do not easily transfer to numbers. The outcome? ChatGPT is poor at math as reported by The Guardian. 

“It may strike us as ironic that a computer system would be bad at math and good at creativity, but it does speak to an important fact about generative AI systems in general: they don’t understand context. They don’t know what words or numbers actually mean, they are simply predicting what should come next,” said Newman. Although ChatGPT recently made some improvements to its numerical skills, it appears that correct crochet designs are still beyond the program's grasp. These AI flaws, according to Newman, are inevitable as the technology develops.