Ask HN: Are ChatGPT answers getting worse for anyone else?

In the past few weeks, I've noted a decline in my desire to use ChatGPT, because it feels like the answers are slowly getting lazier and lazier. I used to be able to ask pointed questions about "how do I use X tool to perform Y job". It's crossed a threshold where if I turn around and google the same thing I'm getting the right answer. Maybe my questions are degrading in quality in some subtle way I can't detect, or maybe I'm asking the wrong questions. I can't help but wonder why it went from great to meh.

The slowness is real; there was a week or two when it was popular in the tech communities but before it exploded across the entire world. The content, I'm guessing this is the nostalgia effect in action. Now that you know what to look for, you are spotting its shortcomings more readily, and you are at the same time asking more niche questions to test the boundaries of its knowledge.

before I got it to write a program to download my YouTube bookmarks as mp3s then I tried again and it said I'm sorry I can't don't that.

then I had to rephrase and say how do you use this popular Python library to do it and it worked.

the first time it was barely worth it because I know there are existing programs that do the same and I could have just used a library manually. now if they make it too limited then people are going to look for alternatives

If one cannot trust the answers being generated by an AI by asking it even basic questions, then it shows that not only ChatGPT is a clever bullshitter but the hype has lead people to believe that ChatGPT is 'intelligent' without questioning why it is giving those wrong answers.

Given ChatGPT cannot transparently explain itself or reason why it is confidently generating wrong answers in the first place tells us that it is fundamentally yet another black box smokescreen useless for anything of serious or safety critical application.

There is nothing new in this ChatGPT AI hype other than 'train it on a snapshot of the entire internet' and see what happens and offer an API with grifters suddenly calling themselves 'AI companies'.

Probably hard to judge from asking other HN users. People who respond are likely to be others who also happen to feel the same way. I haven't noticed any change myself.