[i_dont_know_]

To me, it feels like it's started giving superficial responses and encouraging follow-up elsewhere -- I wouldn't be surprized if its prompt has changed to something to that effect.

Before, if I had an issue with a library or debugging issue, it would try to be helpful and walk me through potential issues, and ask me to 'let it know' if it worked or not. Now it will try to superficially diagnose the problem and then ask me to check the online community for help or continuously refer me to the maintainers rather than trying to figure it out.

Similarly, I had been using it to help me think through problems and issues from different perspectives (both business and personal) and it would take me in-depth through these. Now, again, it gives superficial answers and encourages going to external sources.

I think if you keep pressing in the right ways it'll eventually give in and help you as it did before, but I guess this will take quite a bit of prompting.

[nullsense]

>To me, it feels like it's started giving superficial responses and encouraging follow-up elsewhere -- I wouldn't be surprized if its prompt has changed to something to that effect.

That's the vibe I've been getting. The responses feel a little cagier at times than they used to. I assume it's trying to limit hallucinations in order to increase public trust in the technology, and as a consequence it has been nerfed a little, but has changed along other dimensions that certain stakeholders likely care about.

[YurgenJurgensen]

Seems like the metric they're optimising for is reducing the number of bad answers, not the proportion of bad answers, and giving non-answers to a larger fraction of questions will achieve that.

[mrtranscendence]

I haven't noticed ChatGPT-4 to give worse answers overall recently, but I have noticed it refusing to answer more queries. I couldn't get it to cite case law, for example (inspired by that fool of a lawyer who couldn't be bothered to check citations).

[bdhcuidbebe]

> I think if you keep pressing in the right ways it'll eventually give in and help you as it did before, but I guess this will take quite a bit of prompting.

So much work to avoid work.

[jeffhuys]

Yes, that's exactly why I use GPT - to avoid work.

Such a short-sighted response.

[spopejoy]

The rush to adopt LLMs for every kind of content production deserves scrutiny. Maybe for you it isn't "avoiding work" but there's countless anecdotes of it being used for that already.

Worse IMO is the potential increase in verbiage to wade theough. Whereas before somebody might have summarized a meeting with bullet points, now they can gild it with florid language that can hide errors, etc

[boringuser2]

I don't mind putting in a lot of lazy effort to avoid strenuous intellectual work, that shit is very hard.

[killingtime74]

I assume you're talking about ChatGPT and not GPT-4? You can craft your own prompt when calling GPT4 over API. Don't blame you though, the OP is also not clear if they are comparing Chat GPT powered by GPT3.5 or 4, or the models themselves.

[Terretta]

When using it all day every day it seems (anecdotally) the API version has changed too.

I work with temperature 0 which should have low variability yet recently it shifted to feel boring, wooden, and deflective.

[caddemon]

I can understand why they might make changes to ChatGPT, but it seems weird they would "nerf" the API. What would be the incentive for OpenAI to do that?

[capableweb]

> What would be the incentive for OpenAI to do that?

Preventing outrage because some answers could be considered rude and/or offensive.

[caddemon]

The API though? That's mostly used by technical people and has the capability (supposedly) of querying different model versions, including the original GPT4 public release.

[nomel]

I wouldn't be surprised if this was from an attempt to make it more "truthful".

I had to use a bunch of jailbreaking tricks to get it to write some hypothetical python 4.0 code, and it still gave a long disclaimer.

[lunakid]

Hehe, wonderful! :) Did it actually invent anything noteworthy for P4?