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Why ChatGPT Gets Stuck in a Loop

Last week at Breakthrough we learnt something new about ChatGPT. And this time, the discovery was made by one of our learning associates.

It is widely known that the more you teach something, the more you actually learn about it. This came true for us last week when both our AI and Leadership & Management Skills Bootcamp group chats had a message from 2 different learners. 2 very different personalities asking their peers to try one prompt on ChatGPT:

“Is there a Seahorse emoji?”

What happened next? Well, everyone learnt something new (including us). We thought we broke ChatGPT. After all, if the most popular OpenAI platform goes into a confused loop to answer your prompt, what else are we supposed to think?

After a few laughs, it got us thinking why does this actually happen? What causes this breakdown of ChatGPT. Come, find out the reason with us!

What happens to AI with

While your first thought after receiving the loop worthy answer maybe that you just broke the matrix, there is a lot more to this scenario.

It may seem that the answer lies in some deep ocean glitch or hidden code. However, what’s actually happening is a surprisingly human story about how AI “thinks,” interprets symbols, and sometimes gets tangled up in its own understanding.

When ChatGPT “goes on a loop,” it’s not because it’s lazy or stubborn. It’s because it’s trying too hard to make sense of something that doesn’t quite add up.

Emojis, believe it or not, aren’t pictures. They’re code. A very specific sets of numbers called Unicode tell your phone or laptop which tiny image to display.

Hence, ChatGPT doesn’t see emojis like we do.

How does AI see emojis?

To us, 🐎 and 🐠 are instantly recognizable as a horse and a fish. But to an AI, these are clusters of Unicode – essentially, long sequences of invisible numbers that tell devices how to draw a particular image.

The seahorse emoji has one of those tricky codes. It’s part of a newer batch of emojis, and not every AI model or platform represents it in the same way.

When ChatGPT tries to process it, a few things can happen:

• It may not recognize the symbol correctly.
• It may interpret it as part of a larger pattern it’s trying to predict.
• Or, worst of all, it gets caught in a loop trying to make sense of a symbol that doesn’t resolve clearly in its system.

Why does the Seahorse emoji cause so much trouble?

Not all emojis cause trouble. So why does this little ocean creature make ChatGPT stumble?

There are two main reasons:

Emoji Encoding Confusion:

The “seahorse” emoji shares similar internal patterns with other emojis that contain combined Unicode characters (like emojis with skin tones or gender variants). If the AI tries to interpret it as text rather than a symbol, it might “hallucinate”. Thereby, creating infinite loops of corrections.

Feedback Loops in Prediction:

ChatGPT’s brain (the large language model) works by predicting the next most likely word, symbol, or character. When it encounters something uncertain (in this case a rarely used emoji) it can keep predicting variations of the same thing endlessly, like a compass spinning near a magnet.

Imagine you asked someone: “Can you hand me the seahorse icon?” and they have many icons, but none labeled clearly “seahorse”.

So they go: “Do you mean this one? Or that one? Maybe this other one?” and you keep clarifying. In the end the person might keep showing you different icons or ask you again what you meant. That is what the model is doing.

The model is trying to match your request to its internal list of symbols. If it’s not confident, it might keep “checking” and “re-checking” and produce repeated responses.

What did we learn here?

What’s fascinating is that something as small as a seahorse emoji reveals something profound about AI. It does not truly understand symbols, it’s interpreting patterns!

The seahorse emoji glitch is more than a tech hiccup, it’s a glimpse into how AI processes the world differently. It reminds us that, for all its intelligence, ChatGPT still swims in a sea of symbols, searching for meaning the way a seahorse drifts through coral: graceful, curious, and sometimes a little lost.

Please note: All images used in the blog are generated on Nano Banana.

The Seahorse Emoji Mystery was originally published in breakthrough on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.