one year on
ChatGPT speaks gibberish overnight, OpenAI investigates unexpected responses
Users flood Reddit and X with screenshots of the chatbot producing Spanglish word salad and repetitive loops as OpenAI says it is investigating.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT spent the night of February 20 speaking in tongues, producing nonsensical responses that mixed English, Spanish, and surreal ramblings. Users on Reddit and X posted screenshots of the chatbot answering simple prompts with phrases like ‘a mouse of science, an easy draw of a sad few’ and repeating the same sentence until the screen filled.
OpenAI acknowledged the issue on its status page at 6:40 p.m. ET Tuesday, saying it was ‘investigating reports of unexpected responses.’ OpenAI said the issue had been identified and was being remediated, but had not elaborated on the cause.
Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus called the episode ‘a warning’ and argued that the systems have never been stable, lacking safety guarantees. The incident, which also affected ChatGPT Enterprise, became a meme as users shared their ‘word salad’ outputs. For a few hours, the chatbot’s answers read less like AI and more like a broken oracle.
The record
Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus described the behavior as 'a warning' and argued that generative AI systems have never been stable and lack safety guarantees.
One Reddit user noted that responses begin normally then 'devolve into nonsense,' while another asked 'Is my GPT having a stroke?'
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
The bug was a config error in the inference kernel, not a rogue AI. It became a defining 'wtf' moment in ChatGPT's early history, often cited in discussions about model reliability. OpenAI later tightened its deployment pipeline to prevent similar kernel misconfigurations.