Exactly! It is definitely a weird new way of discovering a market need or opportunity. Yet it actually makes a lot of sense this would happen since one of the main strengths of LLMs is to 'see' patterns in large masses of data, and often, those patterns would not have yet been noticed by humans.

And in this case, OP didn't have to take ChatGPT's word for the existence of the pattern, it showed up on their (digital) doorstep in the form of people taking action based on ChatGPT's incorrect information.

So, pattern noticed and surfaced by an LLM as a hallucination, people take action on the "info", nonzero market demand validated, vendor adds feature.

Unless the phantom feature is very costly to implement, seems like the right response.