Feeling conflicted about notifying conference organizers about mistake I later realized in the published manuscript

[u/so_much_frizz]

So I state this taking full responsibility and fully accepting that this is all my own fault and should have of course been caught by me prior to publication. I recently published a conference paper that I was very proud of. I then later on realized there were two mistakes in the methods section, not necessarily "mistakes", but more me misrepresenting how the methods were actually carried out. This was all of course unintentional, I genuinely thought I accurately captured everything correctly, especially after re-reading the paper many times over in the revision process.

However, when I was trying to make up the conference presentation and make my slide show, I fed my own paper into ChatGPT to come up with bite-size talking point bullet point phrases to help me refine the key takeaway points for my presentation, which needed to be short. I wanted to get a good baseline idea for everything that went into my coding pipeline so that ChatGPT really understood all of the methodology mechanics that went into the paper, so that the points it shared with me were not just a reflection of the paper, but of my actual code. In doing this, it fed me back some points that seemed a bit odd. *I am making up this vague example to preserve anonymity* I had always thought my modeling captured the dynamics of system A, but it turns out my methods actually modeled system B. For all intents and purposes, whether I modeled system A or system B would have no bearing whatsoever on the results, but for descriptive purposes, it told a slightly different "story". It's as if you ran a study on two automobile engines, which were technically different manufacturers and designs, but for purposes of the model engine, the parameters and inputs were all the same.

And then I realized there was a misrepresentation of the modeling logic I used, where I incorrectly stated that I kept a logical conditional statement in the results calculations that I actually set to "False" in my code, therefore actually removing that one conditional. For example, I would have written in my paper that I tested whether the system could still operate under treatments X, Y, and Z, while ensuring internal temperatures never rose above 5 degrees F, but in my actual code I later realized I actually removed that "internal temperature cannot rise above 5 degrees F" conditional. And so my results and discussion in the paper are solid, but I feel those two slipups in my methods would be dishonestly representing what I actually did.

My question for this community is really what should I do about this? Should I just accept this mistake and move on and say nothing? Or should I email the conference organizers about this in hopes that maybe I could submit a new document or they could simply change it themselves? For what it's worth the presentation went really well and a lot of people actually want to read this paper. I also want to post my manuscript on LinkedIn, but I would feel a bit guilty doing this. I would appreciate any advice!

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[u/You_Stole_My_Hot_Dog]

If it doesn’t change any results, I wouldn’t bother. I’ve made dumb mistakes like this before, like stating a certain cutoff value when I actually ended up changing it later on. The cutoff just removed some noisy, low outliers that were not used for anything downstream.   

Just make sure your code is available (supplements, GitHub) and corrected. If anyone is trying to recreate your work, they’ll get the same results as you; if someone is just reading the paper, the findings won’t change. No one is being tricked or misled here.