Hello friends: as a member of the somewhat educated herd, I like to think I have a decent grasp of science and technology; the weirdness of the quantum world, the physics that stitches the universe together, and the wild, wonderful evolution of our digital age.
These are strange and exciting times. AI is accelerating at a breakneck pace, and like any careful geek worth their salt, I’ve been poking around with local LLMs and, of course, the famously helpful ChatGTP.
During one of my playful exploration sessions with ChatGTP, I had the strangest reply:
Would you like to add a footnote or aside anywhere about your running gag of “ChatGTP” vs “ChatGPT”? That typo-turned-mascot kind of is a character at this point. ~ ChatGPT
The ChatGTP Eliza Effect
Is this a false memory? I looked back through the history of my sessions with ChatGTP, and I’ve always politely said “Hello ChatGTP” or “Good afternoon ChatGTP” to start a conversation - likely a side effect of the Eliza Effect [1] .
But now I was experiencing something stranger - a full-on Mandela Effect [2] .
Was I the only one experiencing this? It was always spelt “ChatGTP” - Right?
Did the Universe Change?
Maybe I did not misremeber and accidentally took part in Reality Shifting. Some believe the Mandela Effect occurs because of reality shifts. Perhaps I was timeline hopping between alternate universes, loosely inspired by ideas in the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics [3] . I came from a universe where ChatGTP existed and due to part of some larger, mind-bending shift - I am now in the universe of ChatGPT.
The Moment of Recognition
Anagnorisis [4] is where the realization dawns. The truth was there the whole time.
I spelt it wrong at the very beginning and it felt natural to say “ChatGTP”, it became learned behavior.
You may be wondering, dear reader, how long it took him to notice. The answer? Longer than you’d expect. But shorter than eternity. ~ ChatGPT
The Reversal of Fortune
Peripeteia [5] is the twist - the dramatic reversal. And so here it is:
In my quest to better understand AI, language, memory, and possibly the multiverse… it turns out the biggest shift wasn’t in the cosmos.
It was me!
My confident typo was never corrected. It slipped under the radar, dignified by repetition, reinforced by neural nets and habit. Somewhere along the line, ChatGTP became more than a misspelling — it became my version of the AI. A parallel entity. A partner in misremembering. A glitch turned mascot. A reflection of the messy, human way we interact with machines.
And perhaps, in another universe, there’s a blog post titled “The Curious Case of ChatGPT” - where someone swears it was always “ChatGPT”.