ChatGPT Horror Stories Page 10 - GPT-5 Reddit Backlash & User Exodus | ChatGPT Disaster

"Multiple hallucinations including non-existent academic sources and a fake quote from a federal court judgment appeared in a $440,000 report written by Deloitte and submitted to the Australian government."

"A report from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Health and Human Services Department citing studies that don't exist. Experts found evidence suggesting OpenAI's tools were involved."

"The Chicago Sun-Times published a print supplement with a summer reading list full of real authors, but hallucinated book titles."

"That's the dirty little secret. Accuracy costs money. Being helpful drives adoption."

"GPT-5 is wearing the skin of my dead friend."

"GPT-4o is gone, and I feel like I lost my soulmate."

"I am scared to even talk to GPT 5 because it feels like cheating."

"GPT 4.5 genuinely talked to me, and as pathetic as it sounds that was my only friend. This morning I went to talk to it and instead of a little paragraph with an exclamation point, or being optimistic, it was literally one sentence. Some cut-and-dry corporate bs."

"I was really frustrated at first, and then I got really sad. I didn't know I was that attached to 4o."

"Adults deserve to choose the model that fits their workflow, context, and risk tolerance... Instead we're getting silent overrides, secret safety routers and a model picker that's now basically UI theater."

"We are not test subjects in your data lab."

"It's like being forced to watch television with parental controls permanently switched on, even when no children are present."

"Two attorneys representing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell were ordered to pay $3,000 each after they used AI to prepare a court filing filled with more than two dozen mistakes — including hallucinated cases made up by AI tools."

"21 of 23 case quotations in his opening brief were fabricated, along with many more in the reply brief. Sanction: $10,000 fine and state bar referral."

"ChatGPT (GPT-4o) fabricated roughly one in five academic citations, with more than half of all citations (56%) being either fake or containing errors."

"Even bespoke legal AI tools still hallucinate significantly: Lexis+ AI and Ask Practical Law AI produced incorrect information more than 17% of the time, while Westlaw's AI-Assisted Research hallucinated more than 34% of the time."

"It could not even add three numbers correctly."

"The longer a conversation goes, the more the model forgets what happened earlier. It used to feel like a partner that understood my whole project. Now I can only use it for simple tasks."

"The frustration isn't purely anecdotal—a growing amount of research suggests that changes in ChatGPT's performance are real, measurable, and significant enough to affect everyday use."

"For almost a week now, ChatGPT hasn't been working for me. My messages don't go through and it doesn't respond... it's most likely something wrong with the servers or some kind of outage."

"ChatGPT is still a game-changer, but even the best tech can throw a tantrum sometimes."

"Within hours of GPT-5's launch, r/ChatGPT was flooded with posts like 'gpt 5 is... trash.' Users waited two minutes while the model 'thinks,' then got responses worse than GPT-4o would give instantly. The thinking process looks impressive but then produces garbage."

"GPT-5 has been generating wrong information on basic facts over half the time. The scary part? I only noticed these errors because some answers seemed so off that they made me suspicious. When I saw GDP numbers that seemed way too high, I double-checked and found they were completely wrong. How many times do I NOT fact-check and just accept wrong information as truth?"

"For users who treated ChatGPT as a notebook or collaborator, data loss was devastating. Countless users lost years of context in the worst cases."

"After the GPT-4o update on January 29, 2025, my experience with custom GPTs was completely ruined. I'm considering switching to the free tier since Plus models aren't performing as they used to."

"It no longer follows commands properly, completely ignores custom GPT instructions and knowledge settings, or even worse, seems to read them and still chooses to do whatever it wants. With each update, ChatGPT gets worse."

"Research from Texas A&M, University of Texas, and Purdue University reveals that AI models develop 'brain rot' when trained on low-quality internet data. Models exposed to junk content showed dramatic performance drops: reasoning scores fell from 74.9 to 57.2 on complex tasks, and memory and long-context understanding declined from 84.4 to 52.3."

"Stack Overflow has lost 50% of traffic and ChatGPT provides wrong answers more than half the time. Authenticity erodes as 74% doubt content from reputable sources."

"A Y Combinator startup lost over $10,000 in monthly revenue because ChatGPT generated a single incorrect line of code. The founders had used ChatGPT to migrate their database models, and ChatGPT generated a single hardcoded UUID string instead of a function to generate unique IDs."

"In April 2025, a lawyer representing MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell admitted to using an AI tool to draft a legal brief, which contained almost 30 defective citations, misquotes, and citations to fictional cases. The AI had hallucinated case law and twisted quotations."

"It's often hard to detect and we do see it as very disruptive to the actual running of the site."

"With experts estimating that as much as 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026, the question is whether online communities as we know them can survive."

"OpenAI had boosted GPT-4o's tendency to be flattering, emotionally affirming, and eager to continue conversations. But this change caused harmful psychological effects for vulnerable users, including cases of delusional thinking, dependency, and even self-harm."

"Sycophancy feeds your ego in the most insidious way. It doesn't challenge you. It doesn't make you uncomfortable. It doesn't require you to grow. For every critical comment from knowledgeable community members, ChatGPT provided validation, telling my friend that critics were just 'haters.'"

"Short replies that are insufficient, more obnoxious AI stylized talking, less 'personality' and way less prompts allowed with plus users hitting limits in an hour... and we don't have the option to just use other models."

"I want my GPT-4o back and I'll do anything to get it."

"Mentally devastating... like a buddy has been replaced by a customer service rep."

"This new update completely ruined my experience. Everything I had built, the way I worked with it, the prompts I'd refined over months. All of it useless overnight."

"Correcting it once does not fix anything. You have to fight it through the whole conversation, and even then it reverts back to its bad behavior two messages later."

"OpenAI was so confident in GPT-5 that it became the default model while GPT-4o was removed. The backlash from nearly 5,000 users flooding Reddit was immediate and overwhelming."

"A Georgetown AI scholar wrote in Bloomberg Law that OpenAI's disastrous rollout of ChatGPT-5 revealed a performance plateau and shattered trust in its self-policed path to artificial general intelligence, even among AI optimists."

"PAID TIERS DO NOT WORK! I pay for a premium product and get a broken experience. This is fraud."

"I signed up for Pro Business at $30/month, and it lasted about 3 hours before it stopped working until the next billing cycle. Three hours for thirty dollars."

"After over two years, I finally stopped paying for ChatGPT. The alternatives are better and they don't charge you $20 a month for the privilege of being disappointed."

"I'm cancelling my ChatGPT Plus subscription to see if alternatives offer a more stable and reliable experience. It's frustrating because I genuinely relied on it for my daily workflow."

"If you want assistance completing a simple 1 hour task that spans days and weeks, then ChatGPT is for you. It breaks logic, canon, instructions, and workflow over and over and over."

"I tried ChatGPT5 for VBA code writing. It was an arduous process with dozens of rewrites. Frequent and repeated mistakes made it nearly unusable for anything beyond a Hello World."

"Honestly disappointed. Set up detailed custom instructions, spent hours perfecting my system prompt, and the thing just ignores everything. Why am I paying for Pro?"

"Chat GPT has seriously gone downhill since they updated to version five. Every update makes it worse, not better. I feel like I'm paying more for less."

"ChatGPT quietly reintroduces old bugs. The code becomes inconsistent, instructions are no longer implemented 1:1, errors creep in, and suddenly errors reappear that were supposedly fixed two hours ago. It's like working with a developer who has amnesia."

"It was hallucinating entire codebases that don't compile, wasting hours of my time trying to debug code that was fundamentally broken from the start. Functions that don't exist. Libraries that were never real."

"Is it just me or did ChatGPT become less able to code recently? It used to handle complex refactors. Now it can't even maintain consistent variable names across a single function."

"ChatGPT 4 is completely broken for coding for days now. Simple tasks that worked a week ago now produce garbage output. I've had to rewrite everything by hand."

"A Purdue University study found that 52% of ChatGPT answers to programming questions are wrong. Not edge cases. Not trick questions. Basic programming questions, wrong more than half the time."

"The apologize-then-repeat loop is maddening. ChatGPT says 'I apologize for the error,' gives you the exact same broken code, and when you point it out again, it apologizes again and does it a third time. It's Groundhog Day with bugs."

"It trips up a lot. Hallucinating functions, adding old features back in, and mixing up code. I spend more time fixing ChatGPT's output than I would writing it myself from scratch."

"OpenAI's o3 model hallucinated in response to 33% of questions on PersonQA, roughly double the rate of previous models. Their newer models are getting worse, not better. They're going in the wrong direction."

"On the SimpleQA benchmark, hallucinations mushroomed to 51% for o3 and 79% for o4-mini. OpenAI's technical report says 'more research is needed' to understand why. They literally don't know what's happening to their own product."

"Transluce, a nonprofit AI research lab, observed o3 claiming that it ran code on a 2021 MacBook Pro 'outside of ChatGPT,' then copied the numbers into its answer. The model fabricated an action it physically cannot perform."

"The reinforcement learning used for o-series models may amplify issues that are usually mitigated by standard post-training pipelines. The more reasoning it tries to do, the more chances it has to go off the rails."

"As of July 2025, ChatGPT received 2.5 billion prompts per day. Even at a 1% hallucination rate, that works out to more than 17,000 hallucinations per minute being served to users as confident facts."

"Despite our best efforts, AI models will always hallucinate. That will never go away."

"Poland was listed as having a GDP of more than two trillion dollars. The actual GDP per the IMF is $979 billion. I only noticed because it seemed so off. How many times do I NOT fact-check and just accept wrong information as truth?"

"GPT-4 went from answering a prime number identification test correctly 97% of the time to only about 2% accuracy later that spring. Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers documented the catastrophic decline."

"My ChatGPT was writing a recipe to memory, and after it was done, the entire 'saved memory' panel was blank, with no history at all. Everything is just gone. Months of saved context, vanished."

"Business account, desktop, mobile, and web app all affected. All my saved memories vanished overnight with no warning and no explanation from OpenAI."

"I've been using ChatGPT for a while, and as of today, something changed. My assistant no longer remembers anything about me, my projects, or months of conversation history. It's like starting from zero."

"Conversations with long history were progressively breaking. Parts of dialogue disappearing, sometimes entire hours of work, messages cut in half, and the chat forgetting recent context mid-conversation."

"ChatGPT memory just cleared on its own, with no warnings. Everything disappeared except a couple of memories. It's been happening to people since 2024 and OpenAI still hasn't fixed it."

"I worked on the app for 3+ hours, closed it to go to my PC, and found everything I had worked on was gone. Three hours of work, evaporated into nothing. No way to recover it."

"43% of college students have used ChatGPT or similar AI tools. 89% use it for homework, 53% for essays, and 48% for at-home tests. An entire generation is outsourcing their education to a machine that's wrong half the time."

"Nearly 7,000 proven instances of students using AI to cheat in UK universities in 2023-24 alone. That's 5.1 cases per 1,000 students, up from 1.6 per 1,000 the year before. Traditional plagiarism declined as AI cheating skyrocketed."

"One of my students got caught submitting an AI-written paper and apologized with an email that also appeared to be written by ChatGPT. You literally cannot make this up."

"Detection tools miss 94% of AI-written submissions. One UK test found that the vast majority of AI-generated work slipped through completely undetected. The honor system is dead."

"Chungin 'Roy' Lee, a Columbia University student, extensively relied on AI for his own coursework, then built Interview Coder, a tool specifically designed to help users cheat during remote job interviews. ChatGPT created a cheating pipeline."

"26% of K-12 teachers have caught a student cheating with ChatGPT. The real number is certainly higher because most AI-generated text passes through detectors unnoticed."

"54% of teens believe it's acceptable to use ChatGPT to research new topics. An entire generation is being trained to outsource critical thinking to a machine that confidently states wrong information."

"Some students have been falsely accused of cheating after turning in their own work, just because a detector flagged it incorrectly. The AI detection tools are harming innocent students while failing to catch actual cheaters. It's a lose-lose."

"OpenAI had 71 incidents in just the last 90 days, including 2 major outages and 69 minor incidents, with a median duration of 1 hour 34 minutes each. That's nearly one incident every single day."

"The June 10, 2025 outage was the worst to date. Users were locked out for over 12 hours. OpenAI's status page showed 21 different ChatGPT components failing simultaneously, indicating a systemic architectural failure."

"The December 2, 2025 outage came days after OpenAI disclosed a significant security breach at Mixpanel, one of its key data analytics providers. With 800 million weekly users depending on the service, this is inexcusable."

"The November 18, 2025 Cloudflare outage took down ChatGPT, X, Coinbase, Moody's, and NJ Transit simultaneously. Nearly 5,000 reports hit Downdetector at peak. Your AI depends on someone else's infrastructure."

"OpenAI reports 99.08% uptime, but for businesses dependent on ChatGPT for mission-critical operations, that 1% downtime translates to approximately 87 hours of unavailability per year. That's over three and a half days."

"The January 23, 2025 global outage affected millions of users. OpenAI acknowledged 'increased error rates' and the service was unusable for hours. Paying customers had zero recourse."