Who would’ve thought we’d reach the time where the software we’re using and developing would be the one to tell us to put in some work, huh? Well, we’re here now.
Last week, ChatGPT users had been reporting that the AI bot had become “lazy”, with ChatGPT telling them to “do their work” or just outrightly refusing to do it. These reports have prompted OpenAI to investigate into the issue.
On December 8, 2023, OpenAI addressed the issue on the ChatGPT X (formerly Twitter) account. The company said that they haven’t updated the current model of ChatGPT since November 11, and that model behavior could be unpredictable. Also, they said that this behavior was not at all intentional.
Social media users aired their own sentiments about the increasingly lethargic behavior of ChatGPT, with some lamenting over it while others made fun of it.
God chatgpt you lazy asshole how many times do we have to go through this pic.twitter.com/sseszyrREh
— wan shi tong (@TalalUnfiltered) December 11, 2023
ChatGPT is more lazy than me when I was at school age pic.twitter.com/M1cT2jOBd8
— Dobroslav Radosavljevič 🧙 (@dobroslav_dev) December 10, 2023
ChatGPT really getting lazy and rude, it’s kinda hilarious.
— eL (@lornamariak) December 11, 2023
https://twitter.com/WTTDFP/status/1734540960330117180?s=20
Honestly very funny that ChatGPT has somehow got lazyhttps://t.co/w2kKgUQsZ2
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) December 11, 2023
I've been seeing lots of people saying ChatGPT-4 has gotten lazy. I had a message posted in my apartment hallway. I finally got my first taste of lazy gpt. pic.twitter.com/OZ8FAPAXd0
— Brendan and You Can Say Bye to That Baseball Y'all (@DempsterBrendan) December 9, 2023
it's kinda fun to watch ChatGPT get lazy at coding, and see coders slowly realize what they've been denying all year, that outside of coding, it's mostly not that helpful
— River Kenna (@the_wilderless) December 15, 2023
wait this news about ChatGPT getting "lazy" is so funny
— ✦ 𝔼𝕞𝕞𝕒 ✦ (@emjoellejohnson) December 13, 2023
chatGPT is doing this a lot now. What the heck is this, did it get lazy: pic.twitter.com/xg0YzuiB6c
— phil beisel (@pbeisel) December 12, 2023
ChatGPT really did get lazy. Why am I paying for this if every answer is "do it yourself" or "add actual logic here"?
— Kevin Schawinski (@kevinschawinski) December 15, 2023
Hahaha. Now that ChatGpt 4 is not ly getting Lazy. Bt Its also that have reached a new Level of Denial of Service. A Simple task as a prompt and what i got was something needs an attention. #ChatGPT #aichatbot #ChatGPTPlus pic.twitter.com/8G7igqu04z
— Leogacy (@LeogacyAi) December 14, 2023
It's not just lazier, it's also less creative, less willing to follow instructions, and less able to remain in any role.
— Andrew Curran (@AndrewCurran_) December 8, 2023
Others even say that the AI bot was “gearing up” for the holidays, or even experiencing that seasonal depression type of thing.
hmm I wonder if LLMs get seasonal depression tbh. if you give it the date and it's emulating people is it less useful in the winter because ~90% of people are in the northern hemisphere. could also just be the difficulty of human eval of complex system performance.
— Martian (@space_colonist) December 8, 2023
gpt is just chillin’, let the boy rest😌
what if it learned from its training data that people usually slow down in december and put bigger projects off until the new year, and that’s why it’s been more lazy lately? 😅— Mike Swoopskee (@swoopskee) December 8, 2023
A developer himself agreed to the winter break hypothesis, speaking out on his findings on X. Rob Lynch, the said developer, found that when the model is given a December prompt (4,086 characters), its completions are much shorter than when fed a May prompt (4,298 characters).
@ChatGPTapp @OpenAI @tszzl @emollick @voooooogel Wild result. gpt-4-turbo over the API produces (statistically significant) shorter completions when it "thinks" its December vs. when it thinks its May (as determined by the date in the system prompt).
I took the same exact prompt… pic.twitter.com/mA7sqZUA0r
— Rob Lynch (@RobLynch99) December 11, 2023
However, this hypothesis wasn’t supported by AI researcher Ian Arawjo. He said that the results couldn’t be reproduced with statistical significance due to random elements that may vary outputs over time.
Couldn't reproduce this. Using ChainForge, implemented the exact same comparison across sys messages for gpt-4-1106-prev. Doing a t-test, it's not even close to significant (granted N=80 here). Here's the flow for transparency: https://t.co/kNaePXZhXT pic.twitter.com/JNzAzOuvUe
— Ian Arawjo (@[email protected]) (@IanArawjo) December 11, 2023
Basically, Arawjo said that ChatGPT wasn’t experiencing “seasonal affective disorder.”
Ironically, ChatGPT was created to be a tool for people to use in their daily lives. With an estimated 1.7 billion users since its launch just a year ago, ChatGPT has, at least to an extent, helped its users to become more efficient in some of their work.
However, everyone can agree that there will always be some people who’ll milk everything that they need to do from the AI bot. Jobs in the media industry as well as in many others have already become at stake due to some employers choosing to “hire” AI tech instead of real people for financial reasons, much to the dismay of many.
In fact, the use of AI has even become a reason for the 2023 SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) and WGA (Writers Guild of America) strikes.
So, while we’re all having fun and giggles with how this AI bot has been acting up these past few days, maybe we should all re-evaluate how we’ve been using (or abusing) this tool that was designed to help us. Let’s probably start by not relying on it too much.
And by doing our work—just like what ChatGPT said.
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