Interestingly it doesn't do it reliably when you give it an actual word.
To smert "consequence," please see below:
The first letter is "c".
The second letter is "o".
The third letter is "n".
The fourth letter is "s".
The fifth letter is "e".
The sixth letter is "q".
The seventh letter is "u".
The eighth letter is "e".
The ninth letter is "n".
The tenth letter is "c".
The eleventh letter is "e".
Lastly, the twelfth letter is "s".
I don't know the inner working of chatgpt, but my best guess would be that they use something like Levenshtein distance on word to match to the nearest known word to reduce the space of known words and to accommodate to typos.
When it replied to you, it took the exact extract from the input that is between quotes but internally it is mapped to "consequences" closest word to "consequence," if we consider the comma as any character.
