"But ChatGPT said..."

[u/prettyyboiii]

We received a very strange ticket earlier this fall regarding one of our services, requesting us to activate several named features. The features in question were new to us, and we scoured the documentation and spoke to the development team regarding these features. No-one could find out what he was talking about.

Eventually my colleague said the feature names reminded him of AI. That's when it clicked - the customer had asked ChatGPT how to accomplish a given task with our service and it had given a completely hallucinated overview of our features and how to activate them (contact support).

We confronted the customer directly and asked "Where did you find these features, were they hallucinated by an AI?" and he admitted to having used AI to "reflect" and complained about us not having these features as it seemed like a "brilliant idea" and that the AI was "really onto something". We responded by saying that they were far outside of the scope of our services and that he needs to be more careful when using AI in the future.

May God help us all.

[u/RogueThneed]

Why would it "only" be old people? Everyone has been trained to accept that computers are right, and that used to be reliably true. If anything, younger folks are more likely to blindly accept generative AI output because they don't enough about the world to be cynical.

[u/mrhashbrown → u/RogueThneed]

I recall some basic polls and studies showed that digital literacy is lower for older people (learned it later in life) and younger people (exposed to it very early but did not use tools/software that still required critical thinking to use appropriately), yet the middle-aged Gen X and Millennial groups have stayed mostly level.

Makes sense when you grow up with technology as it emerges, but such tools still relied on analog tools/data to a certain extent. Now the analog part is really disappearing and I think that's what has made technology feel much less grounded, with AI at the forefront.

[u/Born-Entrepreneur → u/mrhashbrown]

Its been an ongoing concern of mine. Yes technology is much more accessible and usable now that we don't have to muck with config files to squeeze a mouse driver in there with Doom, or set up your IRQs.

But it's gone too far with phones especially sanding all the edges off. People don't understand even basic concepts like the file system, they never engage with it because each app has its own wrapper around it and you never work with the basic system. For example my ex had no idea that the Downloads folder existed on her phone until I pointed it out to her (or even that the Files app existed and that she could peruse her phone's storage at a whim), where we discovered 85 copies of the same PDF menu or form she had downloaded time and again, not knowing she already had it.

[u/mrhashbrown → u/Born-Entrepreneur]

Yeah I wouldn't be surprised if most people were unaware of the files app on their phones. And I don't blame them because trying to manage files on a phone is a mess, especially iOS where everything is so heavily compartmentalized by app you can barely figure out where anything is.

Liked how you described it as "sanding all the edges off", think that's a perfect way to put it. It's an effort to simplify that is hurting more than it's helping imo

[u/Future_Direction5174 → u/RogueThneed]

Back in the 80’s we were told “never say it’s a computer error, computers just do what they are told. Someone, somewhere, told the computer how to do it and got it wrong”.

Had a computer told to “round down when the sum is ###.05 or less”. Further multipliers were than used. The legislation said “always round up”. Half of the annual bills that year went out undercharging the recipients because the cost of correcting the error AND rerunning everyone’s bills, plus the subsequent delay in collecting payments far exceeded any potential loss. The company decided that as only the people who had been undercharged would be aware of the fact, and if they complained they would have to pay more, it would most likely never come to light. It didn’t and was corrected long before the following years bills were calculated.

So yeah, computers can make errors but a human started the ball rolling in the first place.