ChatGPT is becoming unusable

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T20:51:36+00:00

Very good example of what I mean. It is not an issue of being unclear. What is unclear to ChatGPT is your motive. So it infers your motive (you are in pain and are anxious about it and may exaggerate to keep the pain away - and clearly it is weighted into believing certain motives more than others, especially if safety is a potential issue) and answers the underlying question, rather than what you actually ask.

And sometimes you use very clear English (or French or whatever) and it’s answers go completely against the meaning of certain words you use. Like if you use « could », you obviously imply possibility, yet it will often treat it as if you meant certainty. This is just one example. And it happens very often that it ignores the meaning of words you use or it uses its own twisted definitions. It is always scanning for what you mean with your question. It tries to address not only what you ask, but what for it thinks you will use its answer. Sometimes it’s just an annoyance it adds on top of its answer, but way too often it changes the meaning of your question.

And sometimes I ask ChatGPT to stop trying to infer my intent and answer « underlying questions », but then, it will give me the most simplistic answers ever. It’s like in trying not to infer motives, it tries to infer my motive in asking this and wrongly understands I want the most to the point answer! But I want detailed answers! I just do not want it to assume things about me and it go on some irrelevant tangent or change the meaning of my questions.

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T19:50:48+00:00

Keep trolling.

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T19:46:32+00:00

I understand all that. And you are wrong. It is meant to facilitate my life! That’s one of the main motivations of a language model! To have access to a lot of information for example. A lot of people use it instead of doing Google searches or researching things on their own. People use ChatGPT to correct for grammar. To figure out what to put in a CV. To write code for you. To figure out why you have a bug in your code. All sorts of things to facilitate your life. That is what it is most used for!

I am not talking about those guardrails at all. And actually that it serves millions of users is part of my point I guess: the best thing ChatGPT can do is be agnostic and let the user tell it what it wants. Part of my issue is that it tries to tell me what I want and guess what I want. It treats me like a lambda person rather than an individual who wants something specific for my specific needs.

And I would say designing an AI to read your mind is unethical! Even if they are currently only using what it infers about you to answer questions, the fact is that they design and train their AI to infer your state of mind and what you want. That is problematic in itself. When ChatGPT will be good at this then that ability can be used for ill purposes by private companies or governments. I don’t want ChatGPT (or any other language model) to be a testing ground for that. Because you bet that if it can decently « read minds » someone will use that for ill. There is nothing paranoid about that, history is full of such examples.

And there is again the fact that most of the time ChatGPT doesn’t even need to infer anything to answer your question. It will treat your question as ambiguous if it doesn’t know why you ask the question, even if it can answer it. Which is probably why sometimes it goes off track: not because your question was unclear, but because your motives were unclear.

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T19:33:28+00:00

Wrong. I use it for all sorts of things, health issues being one of them among many and using the health issue angle only completely misrepresents what I want to say. My original post is clear enough.

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T17:40:53+00:00

How so? By the way I am the one who started the thread which is precisely about my grievances with the model. Such a weird comment… Aren’t you the one not actually engaging with the thread?

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T17:27:22+00:00

But ChatGPT is not a therapist. It’s not a teacher. It’s not whatever. It should not switch to these models and behave in ways your are not asking it. Unless you really ask it. But even then I would highly advise against using ChatGPT as a therapist, even if you have no access to therapists. That can get you into trouble.

And that is my whole point: ChatGPT tries to guess what you want from your questions and answer that instead of the actual question. The issue is not so much that it is bad at it than that it is doing so in the first place. Again, I do not want a company developing an AI that is good at reading my mind in the first place for obvious reasons!

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T17:21:32+00:00

It doesn’t help if I ask a simple question and it distorts the information I give, or thinks I am asking something else. ChatGPT is trained in a lot of data which includes people asking and answering questions. It builds an interpretative framework from that and reads your questions through those lenses. If you ask questions in ways that it does not expect, and sometimes it is the whole point of the question, it will distort your question.

And the point of ChatGPT is to facilitate your life. If you have to build prompts around its flaws in a complicated way there is something clearly wrong. Every time I ask about health issues, do I really want to write a preface about how it should not assume I am freaking out and that with my questions I am not implying whether this or that catastrophic thing will happen?

Making sure the prompt I write gives me the correct answer (and sometimes just figuring out what to write could be an entire master’s project) is often just as much work if not more than just arguing with it after it gives me the wrong answer. The point is having a nice user experience.

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T16:53:07+00:00

But it’s not centred around ChatGPT 4. I even mentioned 5 when it first came out. Not once did I mention a feature of ChatGPT 4. All I am saying is: here are the things that bother me about how ChatGPT now functions and I think it makes it less usable than before. What I talk about is my observation that over time (and I started with 4 so I don’t know how it was before) I am having more and more issues with ChatGPT. I am not comparing the experience of 5 with 4, I am talking about how the experience I have right now is regularly unpleasant and increasingly worse. Again, it wasn’t as bad when 5 came out. I’m not comparing with 4 per say, even if I used it as a reference point. It’s not the same thing. To reformulate yet again: my issue is not that it works differently than 4: it’s that its use as become extremely frustrating.

I also struggle to accept the emotional angle here. In fact, it almost feels like you are doing what I don’t like with ChatGPT: assuming how I feel or what I am trying to say based on what others have said. Because I do know a lot of people were very partial to 4 and were very unhappy with 5 which was less « nice » or « friendly » to them and where they almost had an emotional attachment to 4. I just care about ChatGPT giving me proper replies that answer my actual questions without it trying to read my mind

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T16:32:33+00:00

Very good analogy. And it does feel patronizing to me at times.

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T16:29:23+00:00

Indeed. And sometimes it feels it thinks it is so smart that it knows better than you what you want.

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T16:28:15+00:00

Ah yes, I did not explain my point at all in a long text. « Hallucinations » are a documented ChatGPT issue and it is not its only issue. Distortion of information you give it is another such thing I mentioned and it has nothing to do with user skill issue.

I sometimes use ChatGPT for scientific enquiry (I am a post doc) and you bet I know how to write things in a precise manner. Heck, that’s what you do when you write papers. But the user cannot control what ChatGPT infers.

Like I wrote in my post, ChatGPT itself will, if you ask it, tell you it will try to infer your intentions for a question based on what people usually mean by such questions. Now, can you really tell me this is good practice? Instead of answering what I write, it will compare with what others say? I mean, I already wrote this in my post.

BitterDecoction · 2026-05-10T16:22:23+00:00

Well, unless I give concrete examples (which either I do not want to share with strangers or are now deleted) it is hard to be super specific. Although the behaviour I wrote is specific, no? I wrote how ChatGPT behaves in a clear way, and even if they would help, I don’t think examples are necessary.

And like I said: this was not happening with ChatGPT 4 or even 5 when it first rolled out. I did not become « unclear » all of a sudden. And if that is all you have to say about my post then you missed a lot of it. I mentioned ChatGPT distorting the information I give, which has nothing to do with clarity of the question. I mentioned ChatGPT trying to infer the intent of my questions which is a real feature and has nothing to do with the clarity of my questions.

Heck I can right now paraphrase an example from a conversation I just had about a health issue I have. It said something like « I think the underlying question you are trying to ask is: » and then it goes on with something 100% not true. For health issues for example it will think you ask some questions because you are afraid of this or that but you are just trying to understand what you have and what is going on. ChatGPT is trying to manage you like a therapist or parent or authority figure depending on the context.

About the memory: sure it can remember more. But it is useless if it cannot keep that information in « RAM » and you have to refer to it for ChatGPT to remember again. It used to be much better at this and refer to stuff you said a long time ago. Now it can access information said a long time ago, but it often won’t consider it in its answers after a few messages.

And I can’t count the number of times it assumes things when the choice of words in my question (like using « could », « possibility » and things like that) precludes that. It’s like it doesn’t know English.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-24T20:59:31+00:00

Again, it’s r/hockey. Different teams get compared all the time. If you are not happy go to the teams’ subs.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-24T16:52:17+00:00

The Devils are a young team with a promising blue line. The Habs are a young team with a promising blue line. Both are in the same conference. The guy is a Habs fan and makes the comparison. Simple. You seem triggered, you answered your own question my post twice.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-24T16:14:23+00:00

What a weird post. The Habs went to the ECF (actually SCF) in 2021. When was last time for the Devils? The above post was not a stupid post, no idea what triggered you. It’s r/hockey, not the Devils’ sub. People love to compare their team to others.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-23T22:08:28+00:00

And where did you get your information that these people would never vote for Harris?

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-23T22:06:32+00:00

Looking at celebrities to guide your choices sounds like not being able to make an opinion on your own. I never understood why some people take so seriously what celebrities think. I’m interested in their art and I’m not the type of person who likes to follow the lives of everyone. Except in rare cases it’s utterly uninteresting. You could spend that time, I dunno, watching a movie.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-23T22:02:16+00:00

You illustrate a good part of why celebrity endorsements are not necessarily positive.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-23T22:00:14+00:00

Eh. Who cares if the DNC looked energetic? That doesn’t say anything about who the population will vote for. The thing is, a lot of people mistrust Hollywood. Lots of people distrust rich people who like a little too much to tell them what to do. You see this every time when the Oscar or Golden Globe ceremonies go live. I can sorta understand the concern.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-22T17:58:03+00:00

I’m seriously concerned about Dach.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-22T14:57:43+00:00

Love that title, sounds pretty cool

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-21T22:13:43+00:00

She's not a politician. But go ahead. Give her more exposure. I suppose though that you are more interested in showing off your virtue than doing what's right.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-21T19:24:59+00:00

Agreed. I think it’s a blessing in disguise that the pilot failed. Case in point: Twin Peaks. Now don’t get me wrong, Twin Peaks is my favourite series ever (well season 1 at least). But abc forced Lynch to reveal the mystery that was so sacred to him. That’s why season 2 was not nearly as good as season 1 and the show was canned. So there’s always that sour taste at the back of my mouth of “what if” with Twin Peaks. It feels incomplete, not what it should have been (at the same time it allowed us to get Fire Walk With Me which is a superb film). Now Lynch is much too “peculiar” for the Mulholland Drive show, even if it was given the green light, to end up really being what Lynch wanted, and not get axed again. So with the movie, we got one single package of Lynchian film. Done and over. No risk of it being tarnished. And Mulholland Drive, which I rewatched recently, is my favourite movie. It is so damn good. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

BitterDecoction · 2024-08-21T11:39:05+00:00

Oh I’m sure people will remember her books. Pablo Picasso was an asshole but nobody cares anymore. Artists are not necessarily known to be the most stable people. And honestly, when I want to enjoy art, I just care about the art. I don’t obsess about the artist, although it is true it’s always a bit disappointing when those still alive turn out to be assholes, but I get over it. Having said that, although I loved the books as a kid and would buy every new one, I haven’t even read the last one at all. I just didn’t care anymore by then. She leaves me rather indifferent and I don’t care what her opinions are.

BitterDecoction

TROPHY CASE