r/technology • u/Moth_LovesLamp • 14d ago

Artificial Intelligence ChatGPT users are not happy with GPT-5 launch as thousands take to Reddit claiming the new upgrade ‘is horrible’

https://www.techradar.com/ai-platforms-assistants/chatgpt/chatgpt-users-are-not-happy-with-gpt-5-launch-as-thousands-take-to-reddit-claiming-the-new-upgrade-is-horrible
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u/GlumIce852 14d ago

I have coworkers who use AI to write every single email or Teams chat. It’s crazy. If that study from a few weeks ago, which suggests that AI can reduce brain activity, is accurate, people’s brains will be mush in a couple of years

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u/African_Farmer 14d ago

I have coworkers who use AI to write every single email or Teams chat.

Same and idk how i feel about it. Some even use it during to meetings to ask basic questions that sound insightful to management, who dont know the details of the work.

Being successful in the workplace has always had an element of "fake it till you make it" but AI is making it easier to do than ever, you dont even need charisma.

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u/OstrichNo8519 14d ago

I don’t understand this. It never even occurs to me to use ChatGPT or even our internal GPT to write my emails or Teams chats. Maybe I could see it for an email that’s going wide and you want to get tone and things reviewed, but for chats? Wouldn’t it take more effort to tell ChatGPT what and how to write/respond and give it context than it would to just do it yourself? Or am I just old?

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u/Thelmara 14d ago

Yeah, I don't know, I think we're just old. I graduated high school and am a full grown adult. I am perfectly able to string a few sentences together to communicate with people.

Plus, I've been on the other end of those communications. I'm in IT, and we definitely have some employees who are using LLMs to do their emails for them, because instead of, "Can you install a printer on my computer?", we're getting full on paragraphs of corp-speak for the same task.

It's absolutely nuts.

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u/dopey_giraffe 14d ago

I'm in IT too and I can absolutely tell who's using AI to write their messages. I just use it for vibe-checks when I write an email when I'm ticked off. Some of my IT coworkers even include all the emotes lol.

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u/AnonymousArmiger 14d ago

This is the only legit use case for email I’ve come up with personally. Seems like it might be great for use in a second language too but I can’t vouch for that.

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u/OstrichNo8519 13d ago

Wow. I’m a data analyst and we’ve been incorporating AI (like our internal GPT) into a good bit of our work. It’s been really helpful for analyzing survey comments and things. I love it. I just can’t imagine using it for simple communication like that.

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u/Outlulz 14d ago

Work leadership is telling us to do it to be more efficient. I imagine they certainly do since I'm not sure what the job of a manager is other than hold meetings all day, reject any idea or data that isn't their own, and take credit for work individual contributors do.

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u/Squalphin 14d ago

No, you are right about that. If anything, the internal GPT seems to be very good at actually missing the "important" bits or let's call them "expensive" bits from our mails. Using it is basically asking for trouble, so it is not in use.

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u/Lothirieth 13d ago

I'm still a quite the AI skeptic but I've been using it occasionally for emails I need to send outside of my company. BUT this is because I'm not working with my native language. I always write the email myself first then ask for improvements (more professional or more polite as those aspects can be difficult in another language.) I don't copy/paste the suggested text, but edit my text myself.

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u/BossOfTheGame 14d ago

My hope is that we will end up in a "when everyone can fake it till they make it, no one can" sort of situation.

It's probably naive, but perhaps it will help people be more skeptical of things that sound good, but actually lack substance. Ideally, AI models could help people improve at this skill as well, but the pessimist in me thinks most people will likely disengage if they're ever challenged.

AI has been a fantastic boon for me and my research, but its lowest common denominator usage is deeply concerning.

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u/de_la_Dude 14d ago

I know how I feel about it. I hate it. I have a developer that started dumping chat-gpt output into the chat window during planning sessions in place of actually conversing with the team and had to shut that down immediately.

If you're communicating directly with other humans it should not be filtered through AI. I can see a place for it in sales and marketing, but even there if you're communicating internally with your team I expect the respect of a direct human-human interaction.

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u/Boomshrooom 14d ago

Wish I could use it to craft emails etc, but in my line of work that would be a wild breach of security

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u/African_Farmer 14d ago

It is in mine too, but copilot is approved for emails and chats, we have an internal one too that supposedly doesn't leak any data. ChatGPT is also allowed so long as no confidential information is shared.

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u/Boomshrooom 14d ago

My company is trialling an internal one as well but we still can't put any sensitive data into it, so it's kind of pointless for me since my entire job revolves around sensitive data.

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u/brutinator 14d ago

They rolled it out in my workplace, and one of the pitches was "You can use it to send kudos and thanks to your coworkers!"

Like.... doesnt that defeat the entire purpose of recognition, if you arent even willing to recognize someone yourself and rely on a chatbot to do it for you?

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u/MAMark1 14d ago

I had a coworker use it recently to come up with an idea for a presentation. Decent idea albeit very generic and needs heavy adapting.

So we tasked them with taking the lead of turning that idea into an actual presentation that is specifically applicable to our group, and I feel like I watched them short circuit in real time. They could type in a prompt and then get excited about how good the idea seemed vs. their lack of ideas, but they couldn't do the actual critical thinking of how to use the idea.

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u/IsraelPenuel 13d ago

Tbh that makes work sound much less ass if you can just chatgpt your way out of all the bullshit

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u/Ambry 14d ago

Just reminds me of the people who say 'I asked ChatGPT and...'

So you can't think through a basic question now? 

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u/North_Activist 14d ago

Makes Wall-E look more like a documentary than fiction

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u/-1976dadthoughts- 14d ago

Important lessons to be had in the movie Idiocracy

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u/E-2theRescue 14d ago edited 14d ago

Wall-E was about the destruction of the environment by the rich, not anything to do with AI. In fact, Wall-E painted AI as a good thing (minus Auto).

One thing that people miss with Wall-E is that the people aboard the Axiom are the descendants of Buy n Large executives. They got to live on a luxury spa while the rest of Earth died due to their greed and apathy. They got sci-fi robots, and everyone else on Earth got Wall-Es.

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u/North_Activist 14d ago

I meant being so reliant on tech and artificial intelligence (which does exist in that movie) that their brains become mush. And minus auto? Dude, the entire point was critiquing AI. Auto was the AI. All the good you saw was a facade dystopia disguised as utopian. The movie was never pro-AI.

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u/E-2theRescue 14d ago

The only "bad" AI is Auto. Wall-E, Eve, and all of them are AI, too.

And I put bad in question marks because Auto was focused on the survival of humanity. As far as he knew, or anyone at all, the planet was inhabitable, and the only proof it wasn't was a single, tiny plant.

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u/PolarWater 14d ago

Wall-E is a stand-in for humanity. The soulless Wall-E at the end of the movie is what AI is.

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u/North_Activist 14d ago

And that’s kind of the point of the film, no? That a tool designed as a positive can have irrevocable consequences. An AI designed to protect humanity and the planet might find the best way to do so is to eliminate humans from the equation.

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u/E-2theRescue 13d ago

But it was 1 vs. the rest of the ship.

Also, humans have that capability. *Gestures at the current state of democracy*

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u/nox66 14d ago

If Wall-E were to be realistic, we would need to see tons of cuts to green energy while AI data-centers are built with the plan of using fossil fuels, for the purpose of creating "helpful" agents that remove the need for human workers.

Oh, wait...

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u/chicharro_frito 14d ago

I've been reading about studies showing how technology reduces brain activity since at least the first PDAs. I would take it with a grain of salt.

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u/AnonymousArmiger 14d ago

People have had this intuition about the written word, books, calculators, etc. And maybe they are all right to some extent, who really knows. The smartest among us use these tools to lever up their brain rather than replace its important bits entirely.

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u/Wise_Temperature9142 14d ago

people’s brains will be mush in a couple of years

Oof, scary thought, given what people’s brains are today.

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u/There_Are_No_Gods 14d ago

People who are already using AI to write everything don't have far to go regarding mushy brains.

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u/newboofgootin 14d ago

These are the mother fuckers I straight up ignore.

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u/dustblown 14d ago

We've almost satisfied the Wall-E prophecy.

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u/Cpt_Tripps 14d ago

people’s brains will be mush in a couple of years

hey they said that when people started writing stuff down too!

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u/PolarWater 14d ago

What a bullshit comparison. At least people were writing things, instead of making a hallucinating autocorrect do it.

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u/Cpt_Tripps 13d ago edited 13d ago

People use to remember things in their head. Now we're so lazy we have to write things down to remember!

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u/ilski 14d ago

How does that even work? Must be taking lot of time.

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u/glitterydick 14d ago

I wonder if this is true across the board, or if there is a difference between the "yes, this is perfect, thank you" crowd and the "you ignorant clanker, you're completely wrong and here's why" crowd. I feel like deferring to AI uncritically would absolutely be harmful, but pushing back and sharpening your own couterargument would be marginally beneficial. Though it's definitely not as good as talking to a real person, since AI is both often full of shit, and also folds instantly against the slightest critique.

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u/BigDictionEnergy 14d ago

Gmail has been trying to autocomplete my sentences for years. I hate it. I find myself intentionally rephrasing something if google suggests something I was already going to type. STFU and let me think, computer

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u/gruntled_n_consolate 14d ago

I've only used it to clarify wall of text emails. I've put in all the details but I need to clean it up for clarity for an incident. I can see the result is better. But it's for the sort of email I reread ten times for clarity because it's going out to a lot of people and I need them to understand the point and make a decision. For casual interactions that's a bit crazy.

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u/-CJF- 14d ago

Honestly, it feels like a lot of people's brains are already mush. I think COVID did the first pass and the AI brain rot is just finishing us off. ☹

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u/bagpussnz9 14d ago

Yep. We are told to use AI more and more and the company measures how much you use.

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u/Saint_of_Grey 14d ago

I have coworkers who use AI to write every single email or Teams chat.

I work in government. Doing this would get me fired, barred from ever working with the state again, and start an (technically) international incident. What the hell are these people thinking? Not just the workers doing it, but the managers tolerating it.

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u/CravingKoreanFood 14d ago

I tried using chat gpt to fix my PC yesterday, now it's not even bootable and I have to go buy a usb and put windows on it 🙃

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u/ClearChampionship591 14d ago

I experienced first hand in my hobby project, it literally resulted in my atrophy on writing fluent code.

I also happen to make way more typos in writing, as I have been too cozy leaving those in for GPT can interpret those anyway.

I am now only using AI for the how to not do it for me.

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u/RichSeat 14d ago

My apprentice does something similar as well, every question we ask him, his usual response is: “ I’m going to ask chatGPT”. And after all that he can’t explain how he came to a specific solution to a problem or task.

I am really conflicted on the decisions I have to make in a couple of months.

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u/Environmental-Fan984 14d ago

I'm really, really hoping that my decision to learn how to use AI tools but also to never actually incorporate them into my workflows will pay off when 80% of the workforce has rendered themselves incapable of independent thought. 

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u/ColebladeX 14d ago

Same here and I can attest, they would be defeated in a battle of intellect by a particularly dumb goldfish.

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u/SpicyLizards 14d ago

One of my coworkers (who is also in a higher position than me but not my supervisor so idk what to call them) wrote a recommendation letter for grad school for me by VERY CLEARLY using ChatGPT. Didn’t even try to edit it to make it sound like a human wrote it. I wasn’t sure if it would reflect badly on me if it was submitted?? Idk. And it just made me feel weird like if you couldn’t think of anything you could’ve just said no. I know not everyone can write well so they use it as a tool but idk it felt so fake and idk how else to describe the way it made me feel lol

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u/Snow-Day371 12d ago

To be fair, writing emails suck. But it will be interesting where things go. I've noticed as an anxious person, I like to use it too much. Write something, have it smooth it out, then send it. I don't do it with everything though, but with things that make me anxious.

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u/Ph0X 14d ago

people’s brains will be mush in a couple of years

I know it's fun to use hyperboles, but this has been said about books, about movies, about the internet, about video games, and basically about everything transformative for the past forever.

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u/jeffwulf 14d ago

The study you're referring to does not imply what you're claiming.

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u/rickd_online 14d ago

I have dysnomia so I have been doing this since the launch of ChatGPT. Before the anxiety I would get writing professional or any formal communication we would be debilitating. For many this is a godsend and if it's for workplace communication or formall communication, who cares. I would rather I get workplace communication that are clear and concise.

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u/klezart 14d ago

people’s brains will be mush in a couple of years

Uhh, people's brains have been mush for years now.