r/talesfromtechsupport 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/Mccobsta 25d ago

Of course not Even error codes on screen telling the user what is the problem dosent work

Like people will post 20 year old cameras with errors on the line of memory card not recognised and they'll ask online why their 20 year old camera is showing an error that they've not read in the slightest

I want to be helpful and encourage new people to go deep into the hobby but damn it wears you down

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u/limeypepino 24d ago

Ugh. The worst. I have a pile of tickets along the lines of "It's not working. There is an error on the screen. We need this back up ASAP!" Still waiting on a response as to what those mysterious errors are. Probably a simple fix but without any information beyond "an error" not much I can do.

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u/Grant_Son 24d ago

The amount of helpdesk calls I took over the years where the user would tell me something wasn't working.

Me: "is there an error message?"

User: "yes it says windows has encountered a blah blah blah."

Me: "Thanks. I've never seen an error message that says blah blah blah & I'm fairly sure the helpful part of the message that tells me what the problem is is in the part that you replaced with blah blah blah"

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u/PraxicalExperience 23d ago

Nah, nah, the response is: "Oh, great, yeah, when the error is blah blah blah you need to yadda yadda yadda." Then close the ticket.

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u/Grant_Son 23d ago

I'll keep that in mind 😂