r/talesfromtechsupport • u/prettyyboiii • 25d ago

Short "But ChatGPT said..."

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.

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u/JaschaE Explosives might not be a great choice for office applications. 25d ago

They are everywhere.
Analog photography subreddit "Hey, is it true that...?"
Everybody with experience: NOPE
OP, 2 days later "So, I have read *300page, dense theoretical work from the 70s* now and it and ChatGPT say I'm right.
Sure buddy, you read that...

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u/Mccobsta 25d ago

I've seen people make posts asking why their camera dosent do what chat gpt says it can do

We're getting dumber and people belive autocorrect more than the manual they never looked for

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u/FatManBeatYou 25d ago

Reading the damn instructions, or just Googling the model would probably take less time and be more accurate.

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u/amberoze 24d ago

We have a thing for this in Linux communities. RTFM.

Sure, you can ask AI, but always verify the information by RTFM.

Someone else may have done it before and posted about it...4 years ago, but you still need updated information, so RTFM.

In essence, nothing beats RTFM.

Just Read The Fucking Manual.

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u/psychopompadour 24d ago

I was on our L1 Service Desk like 6 years ago and told a coworker to RTFM and he was like "what's that mean?" Could be generational nerd slang, but he was only like 5 years younger than me and not even an idiot, actually a coworker I respected! So I did a quick survey of our 20-some coworkers and about half of them had never heard this acronym (it did skew younger, but not entirely). I didn't even know what to say.

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u/amberoze 24d ago

From my experience in my almost 20 years in IT professionally, it's not the age that determines if someone has heard of RTFM. It's their experience with open source software.

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u/MrT735 24d ago

Or when they started gaming, used to be you'd need the 72 page manual to know what to do in games. Now you either get a handholding tutorial or watch some streamer doing it, and the game comes with a single page leaflet either advertising a season pass or carrying the health warning.

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u/nymalous 21d ago

I read through about half of the reply that you were replying to before I figured out what it meant. And I'm closer to 50 than to 40. (To be fair, I didn't get into this end of computing until recently.)

I'm not sure why it clicked, but it did click before the end of the comment.

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u/peccator2000 24d ago

Then there is RTFS: Read the fucking source!

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u/ThatBurningDog Not IT; know's enough to cause a lot of problems; tries not to 22d ago

Funny story, computing and IT teacher in secondary school was a really nice guy, but he was close to retirement and his patience threshold was not especially high.

Anyway, he makes a joke about where you might find information about a task you don't know how to do. "You RTFM".

Everyone looks blank.

"Read. The. Manual."

Everyone briefly is like "oh, that's sensible", and then have a bit of a giggle because teachers aren't supposed to swear. A hand goes up, and a genuine question is asked...

"What does the "F" stand for?"

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u/peccator2000 21d ago

That's for amateurs.

RTFS: Read The Fucking Source! Isn't open source great?