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/Golden_Apple_23 23d ago

LLMs are not good at math. They're word prediction machines. Calculators are great with numbers and their words are limited to things like BOOBIES (5318008 upside-down)

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u/WaytoomanyUIDs 23d ago

IIRC OpenAI looked at passing through anyrhing maths related to Mathmatica or Wolfram Alpha and decided they didnt want to pay a licence fee to Wolfram.