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ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

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Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#241

Post by pwpw »

I have been largely unimpressed by how they operate as a company handling users.

Six weeks ago, I tried to change my email but got frustrated that an obvious option wasn’t available in the settings page. So I deleted my account and went to create a new one. When I got to the phone verification, it told me that my phone number could only be used for two accounts, so I was not allowed to sign up. This was the second account I attempted to create, so my phone had only been used once. Naturally, I tried using my google voice phone number, but the system told me that type of number wasn’t allowed.

At this point, I navigated to their support page and had to talk with a chat bot that apparently isn’t powered by ChatGPT. I found it maddening and couldn’t locate an email address to communicate with a human. After a few 10 minute sessions over the course of a few days in search of an email, I finally located one. So I fired off an email explaining how I no longer had access due difficulties stemming from wanting to change my email.

After four weeks, I finally got a response that I’m not sure was written by a human. It completely misunderstood my succinctly described issue and desired resolution. I went back and forth multiple times with support including them suggesting if I am unhappy with their service to sign up for a pro account, pay for the service, and then request a refund. Ignoring the irrationality of the suggestion, I explained how I couldn’t log in to an account at all and simply wanted to access their service again. They continued to insist that once an account is deleted, it is deleted permanently, and I can never have access again. I don’t recall a warning of these major implications at the time of deleting my account with an old email address. At this point, I requested to be escalated to a human and have not heard back for a week now.

Admittedly, I shouldn’t have deleted my account initially, but I had decided that ChatGPT was something I wanted to continue using and needed to switch to my new email address since I have deprecated my old one. This entire process has left me so unimpressed with their company. It’s truly ridiculous how complicated every step has been along the way when I’m normally competent at these types of tasks.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#242

Post by treeman79 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #194
DryLabRebel wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is changing, and children should change with it. Learn and understand technology, and the benefits of where modern machine learning is taking us. But you cannot unironically think we can substitute fundamental skills like essay writing and critical thinking for a degree in 'prompt engineering'?

> But you cannot unironically think we can substitute fundamental skills like essay writing and critical thinking for a degree in 'prompt engineering'? Personally, I don't think that. However, I also think it's logical and good for a child to consider the task at hand and select the most efficient tool available. I am not this girl's parent, and I'm not sure how I would have handled the situation if I was. However, I…

Without a consequence, it’s in one out ear, out the other. Plus we have had the talk about actually reading several times.

Phone is her currency.

A warning on losing it will usually fix any behavior problems.

After one really bad episode of mouthing off to her mother, it sat in the blender for a week.

There was a firm understanding that it was being turned on if she didn’t correct herself.

She’s still a mouthy teenager, but she’s learned to keep it at a playful level and not getting out of hand.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#243

Post by wussboy »

DryLabRebel wrote: post #158
konha wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds incredibly backwards to me. How about accepting new realities and changing homework assignments instead?

The world is changing, and children should change with it. Learn and understand technology, and the benefits of where modern machine learning is taking us. But you cannot unironically think we can substitute fundamental skills like essay writing and critical thinking for a degree in 'prompt engineering'?

You forgot “and drawbacks” after “And the benefits”.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#244

Post by JCharante »

kccqzy wrote: post #47
bfeynman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not an LLM problem, there's a physical divide between a physical stores operation and whatever its representation online is. Google tries to do this by tracking people and activity in locations to see if people are at a place or something but reality is there is not a clean interface to that other than contacting someone at the location.

Google even tries to bridge that gap by having automated phone calls to places to confirm their hours. In fact this past July Fourth weekend I saw so many highly rated restaurants close without updating their hours on Google or Yelp or anywhere else online.

This is the #1 thing that makes me boycott a restaurant. If you don’t care enough about your customers to spend 2 minutes updating your hours then I will never eat there again. It’s absolutely disrespectful to your users/customers.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#246

Post by bagasme »

mrkramer wrote: post #207
tempestn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is you need to collaborate with the LLM, not just expect it to provide fully-formed answers. I've saved countless hours of work over the past few months using GPT-4 to help me solve problems. One general framework can be to use it to help you google a solution instead of a problem. Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate wheth…

>Googling a problem gives you all kinds of results, which you then need to dig through and understand in order to evaluate whether there's something that can be adapted to your use case. Exactly; search engines give you those blue links and short descriptions of the search results which are not enough for you to grasp what is the website about. I think what search engines need to do is tackle the complexity of going…

Yikes! I mean ChatGPT-style search engine is more fit for noobs and the faint-of-heart people (the ones with nothing in the world for them IMO).

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#247

Post by deeviant »

CydeWeys wrote: post #126
stubybubs wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that ChatGPT was just released last fall and it was expected to revolutionize practically everything, isn't it still telling that usage is falling? Where are the scientists, lawyers, doctors, office workers etc? You'd expect a slowing in the rate of growth, not shrinking. I don't know, if high school and undergrad students being off for the summer is enough to shrink your app maybe it's not all that? Edit: I un…

I see people using ChatGPT, Bard, etc. to answer questions on mailing list threads. It'll be a long thread of thoughtful human written responses, and then someone will come along and say "I asked Bard what it thought about this issue, here's the response". And then out comes five paragraphs of text that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and d…

> And then out comes five paragraphs of text that I might as well not even bother reading, as it often contains falsehoods that I have to waste time looking up and double-checking.

I'm curious on if you feel human generated content does not contain falsehoods.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#248

Post by worrycue »

RC_ITR wrote: post #153
tomcam wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I choose to believe that at a minimum, she didn’t read the book, and no AI summary will get you the same experience. Also, lying is bad.

>no AI summary will get you the same experience Yes, but other than being conditioned to believe the experience of reading is superior, why are we striving for that experience? Doing the square root of 147 by hand is a more educational experience than using a calculator, but I can understand the concept of a square root without having to factorize 147 (the same cannot be said of my pre-calculator ancestors). It also…

Reading helps build vocabulary and probably helps improve her use of the language as a whole. It’s like running to lose weight but you decide to cheat by taking a cab instead.

With math, when you are first learning the very basics it helps to do a few problems by hand to get a feel of things. Sure if you have a degree in STEM have have deal with advance math you can probably get away with just reading the theory only.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#249

Post by tjr »

camdat wrote: post #142
JimtheCoder wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more so the fact that someone takes something from ChatGPT, and then just feeds potentially contentious assertions into Google to see if they are true or not. What does someone learn from doing this? What happens when they actually have to use their brain to do something hard? At this point, why bother?

If someone plugs math into a calculator, are they really learning something when it spits out an answer? Of course! How to apply the calculator to problems, and how to discern if a problem is calculator-solveable. We've decided as a society it's better for students to use calculators as a tool in mathematics, why is chatGPT different in literature?

I don't know how calculators are used in classrooms today, but when I was going through school, the general idea was that we could use calculators to do tasks that we had already learned to do.

E.g., we could not use a calculator at all when learning arithmetic.

Once we learned arithmetic and were learning (say) algebra, we could use the calculator to do arithmetic, but not to compute the algebra for us.

While learning trigonometry, we could use the calculator for arithmetic, but not for computing sines and cosines.

While learning calculus, we could use the calculator for arithmetic and sines and cosines, but we could not use it to perform integration or differentiation for us.

And so on.

Re: ChatGPT loses users for first time, shaking faith in AI revolution

#250

Post by RC_ITR »

worrycue wrote: post #248
RC_ITR wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>no AI summary will get you the same experience Yes, but other than being conditioned to believe the experience of reading is superior, why are we striving for that experience? Doing the square root of 147 by hand is a more educational experience than using a calculator, but I can understand the concept of a square root without having to factorize 147 (the same cannot be said of my pre-calculator ancestors). It also…

Reading helps build vocabulary and probably helps improve her use of the language as a whole. It’s like running to lose weight but you decide to cheat by taking a cab instead. With math, when you are first learning the very basics it helps to do a few problems by hand to get a feel of things. Sure if you have a degree in STEM have have deal with advance math you can probably get away with just reading the theory only…

My argument is that reading is actually a very bad way to learn/communicate and always has been.

We just built a very strong culture encouraging it because for a long time it was the most efficient way to do both things.

Now it’s not, but the tradition of it being important is hard to shake.

The closest analogue in my mind is how the classics in their original Greek were considered the only true way to learn for a very long time (even once most of the important knowledge had been translated to English very well).

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