ChatGPT Is Bad With Money

While working with ChatGPT, I got sidetracked by totaling prices, and it was too good (or bad) not to share.

I had a reasonable request: sum up a collection of prices for June and give me the total.

It gave me the sum of $610.56 right away, and since this wasn’t serious work, I didn’t consider verifying that it was correct. Instead, I figured I’d get a breakdown for each month of 2023 so far. When ChatGPT got to June, I noticed something odd:

Instead of $610.56, it was saying the June total was $570.96. We all make mistakes. I asked ChatGPT to double check that total for June:

Ok, we’re back to our original June total. But now I’m second-guessing the rest of the results. Just in case the other months were wrong, I asked to double check each month. Not only did double-checking each month yield different totals, ChatGPT gave me this total for June:

$550.96 makes for the third June total. As a recap, I had gotten:

$35.81 + $31.50 + $23.61 + $33.33 + $22.04 + $19.99 + $149.99 + $36.99 + $36.99 + $33.06 + $34.99 + $172.66 = $610.56

$35.81 + $31.50 + $23.61 + $33.33 + $22.04 + $19.99 + $149.99 + $36.99 + $36.99 + $33.06 + $34.99 + $172.66 = $570.96

$35.81 + $31.50 + $23.61 + $33.33 + $22.04 + $19.99 + $149.99 + $36.99 + $36.99 + $33.06 + $34.99 + $172.66 = $550.96

I copied and pasted the prices into Google and got $630.96:

Google ended up being correct.

ChatGPT is great at a lot of things, but handling prices in this way is not one of them.

Thanks for reading!