Good Luck Beating ChatGPT at Hangman

If you want to know why it's probably not a good idea to use generative AI in financial services (yet), play hangman with ChatGPT.

Here's what happens.

It starts out normally enough. You ask it to play. It explains the rules and then generates a word.

My word had 9 letters and ends in an “o”.

Fun challenge!

But then it gets weird.

ChatGPT forgets that there are two “a”s in the word until I remind it what it had just told me.

Then it tells me there is an “s” in the word, but then it changes its mind and says there is no “s”.

So then I have to remind it (multiple times!) that because I guessed wrongly, I get a body part.

It apologizes and eventually punishes me appropriately.

I then make multiple additional wrong guesses (what the hell is this word?) and get lied to again, this time about the number of “e”s in the word.

Finally, I run out of guesses, and it wins.

The word was “Weatheral”.

I didn’t think you were allowed to use names in hangman, but apparently, ChatGPT doesn’t play by those rules. It reassures me that even though it’s uncommon, “Weatheral” is a real surname.

HOWEVER!

You will notice that ChatGPT cheated at several points along the way, telling me the wrong places for certain letters and just removing the “o” from the end altogether.

This isn’t good enough for me, so I ask it to diagnose what went wrong — why did it give me this nonsense word that didn’t match the letters I’d already guessed?

The answer is fascinating.

It generated the word *after* I’d already made all my guesses!

That’s the opposite of how hangman works!

But large language models (LLMs) are predictive. They’re designed to tell you what they think you want to hear, not what’s objectively true.

It worked as designed.

And that’s the problem with using generative AI techniques like LLMs and transformers in financial services.

You don’t want a chatbot guessing what someone’s credit limit is or telling a customer what it thinks they want to hear when collecting on a debt.

We need certainty in financial services.

If you want to learn more about how generative AI works and (maybe) where it actually might be useful in financial services, read my latest essay over at Fintech Takes: The Most Intriguing (and Terrifying) Fintech Use Case for Generative AI.