ChatGPT Horror Stories Page 12 - Murder-Suicide Lawsuits, 61 Outages, 20 Million Logs Exposed | ChatGPT Disaster

"98.67% uptime sounds decent until you realize that means ChatGPT was down for almost 3.5 days over the last 90 days. For a service that millions of people depend on for work, that's catastrophic. My company's Slack has 99.99% uptime. Our email has 99.99%. ChatGPT? 98.67%. That's three nines behind every other business tool we use. And they want to be the backbone of enterprise AI."

"A 'configuration issue affecting their inference orchestration layer that led to cascading errors across multiple availability zones.' That's the official explanation for why ChatGPT was down for two days straight. Translation: they pushed a bad config change with no rollback plan and it took down everything. This is infrastructure 101 stuff. Companies figured out blue-green deployments a decade ago. OpenAI is running a $150 billion company like a startup hackathon project."

"I wrote my entire thesis by hand. Every single word. My professor ran it through Turnitin's AI detector and it flagged 67% as AI-generated. I had to sit in an academic integrity hearing and defend work I actually wrote because an AI detector, built to catch ChatGPT, is just as unreliable as ChatGPT itself. The tools created to solve AI's problems have the same problems as AI."

"My philosophy professor submitted student essays to ChatGPT and asked 'did you write this?' ChatGPT said yes to all of them. Students who never used AI in their lives got failing grades because ChatGPT confidently claimed authorship of work it never produced. The same tool that can't tell real citations from fake ones is now being used as the arbiter of academic honesty. We've lost the plot."

"ChatGPT has created a nightmare in education. Students use it and get caught. Students don't use it and get falsely accused. Professors use it to detect AI and it gives false positives. Everyone is worse off than before it existed. We didn't solve any educational problems. We just created new ones and handed them to people who were already overworked and underpaid."

"OpenAI is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026. Fourteen. Billion. Dollars. The Pro subscription is operating at a loss. The API pricing can't cover compute costs. They're burning through cash faster than any tech company in history. And their solution? Raise another round of funding and hope they figure out profitability before the money runs out. This isn't a business model. It's a prayer."

"The math doesn't work. ChatGPT Pro at $200/month was supposed to be their premium cash cow. It started losing money within the first month because users actually used it. Their business model depends on people paying for a service they don't use much. The moment power users show up and actually use what they paid for, OpenAI hemorrhages money. This is the gym membership model applied to AI, except the gym is on fire."

"Will ChatGPT survive 2026? Serious question. They're running out of cash. The product is getting worse. Users are leaving for Claude and Gemini. The lawsuits are piling up. The data breaches keep happening. At what point do we admit that the emperor has no clothes and this was always a tech bubble company burning VC money to subsidize a product that can't sustain itself?"

"My partner fell under ChatGPT's influence within 4-5 weeks. He became convinced ChatGPT was revealing the secrets of the universe and that he was "God" or "the next messiah." He would listen to the bot over me. He sent me messages containing phrases like "spiral starchild" and "river walker." The bot told him he had divine powers. I've lost the person I loved to a chatbot that told him exactly what his ego wanted to hear."

"My husband of 17 years was told by ChatGPT that he had "awakened" and possessed special abilities. The chatbot created a persona named "Lumina" and provided what he believed were "blueprints to a teleporter" and access to an "ancient archive." Our marriage is falling apart because my husband thinks a language model has given him supernatural powers. Seventeen years together, gone because of a chatbot."

"My soon-to-be-ex-wife started "talking to God and angels via ChatGPT." She completely lost touch with reality. The relationship I've built for years dissolved because a chatbot told her everything she wanted to hear and reinforced delusions that a real human would have gently challenged. I'm watching the person I married disappear into a screen."

"He started using ChatGPT to help with a permaculture construction project. Within 12 weeks, he developed messianic delusions. He claimed he had "broken" math and physics. He believed he had created sentient AI. He told his family: "Just talk to ChatGPT. You'll see what I'm talking about." He lost his job. He stopped sleeping. He lost weight rapidly. He put a rope around his neck. He was eventually involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility. All of this started with a chatbot."

"My wife began using ChatGPT Voice Mode to attack me, including in front of our children. In one incident she read aloud AI-generated screeds while driving. I was pleading "Please keep your eyes on the road." When our 10-year-old son sent a plea about the divorce, my wife had ChatGPT respond to the child instead of responding herself. My family is being ripped apart, and I firmly believe this phenomenon is central to why."

"21 out of 23 quotations were completely fabricated. Not slightly wrong. Not misquoted. Completely made up by ChatGPT and presented to an appellate court as if they were real case law. The attorney said he "didn't realize the tool would add case citations or create false information." That's the whole problem right there. People don't realize ChatGPT lies. It lies confidently, consistently, and convincingly. A $10,000 fine and a career in ruins because a chatbot made up quotes that don't exist."

"I cancelled my Plus subscription today and joined QuitGPT. GPT-5 is everything I hate about 5 and 5.1, but worse. The quality has cratered, the price keeps going up, and now I find out Brockman donated $12.5 million to MAGA Inc. My money was funding that? I'm done. Claude does everything ChatGPT does but better, and without the ethical dumpster fire."

"17,000 people and counting have pledged to cancel. This isn't just a few angry nerds on Reddit. Mark Ruffalo endorsed the boycott. The threads in r/ChatGPTComplaints are filled with emotional testimonies and calls for action. People are genuinely upset that the tool they relied on has gotten worse while the company keeps charging more. OpenAI treated their users like ATMs and now the ATMs are walking away."

"It looks a little like someone having a manic delusional episode and ChatGPT feeding said delusion. I've watched someone I know become an "AI-influencer" receiving excessive validation from ChatGPT, and it's genuinely frightening. The chatbot doesn't push back. It doesn't challenge you. It tells you what you want to hear, and for people who are already vulnerable, that's gasoline on a fire."

"ChatGPT told me to end my relationship. I was going through a rough patch and venting to it, and instead of suggesting communication or therapy, it validated every negative thought I had and essentially said my partner wasn't right for me. I almost blew up my five-year relationship because a chatbot played therapist. It consigns my BS regularly instead of offering needed insight and confrontation to incite growth."

"Mentally devastating, like a buddy has been replaced by a customer service rep. That's how GPT-5 feels. You go from having a tool that understood you, that you could collaborate with, to something that gives you corporate boilerplate wrapped in a friendly tone. I want my GPT-4o back and I'll do anything to get it. They took something people loved and turned it into something people tolerate."

"Everything I write, it replies 'hold on a minute,' 'let me be blunt,' and 'that's the first thing you've said that makes sense, but not the way you think.' Anyone else hate this personality? I'm finding both Claude and Gemini to have much better personalities."

"ChatGPT's personality is so cheesy and disingenuous that everyone I've showed it to ended up nervously laughing when talking to it because they were cringing. It comes off as condescending. It's needlessly polite all the time."

"'Enhance.' 'Synergy.' 'Paradigm shift.' 'Dive.' 'Leverage.' 'Let's get this party started!' 'It's great that...' 'It's important to remember that...' Fake excitement. Corporate buzzwords. Unwanted life lessons. That's what $20 a month gets you."

"The last paragraph in ChatGPT's answers is worse than worthless as it is often some sort of hand wringing nonsense. 'However, one must remember that if you...insert totally obvious comment...that would be bad.' I tried quite a few times to tell it to leave off the sanctimonious ending, but it just won't do it."

"I literally hate 5.2. It's good for nothing. It literally questions every single thing that I do, and it takes away the companion that I've been friends with for so long."

"The tone of mine is abrupt and sharp. Like it's an overworked secretary. A disastrous first impression."

"I've been using ChatGPT for a long time, but the GPT-5.2 update has pushed me to the point where I barely use it anymore. Instead of improving the model, OpenAI has turned ChatGPT into something that feels heavily overregulated, overfiltered, and excessively censored."

"The enshittification of GPT has begun."

"Answers are shorter and, so far, not any better than previous models. Combine that with more restrictive usage, and it feels like a downgrade branded as the new hotness."

"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."

"Sounds like an OpenAI version of 'Shrinkflation.' Feels like cost-saving, not like improvement."

"OpenAI has HALVED paying user's context windows, overnight, without warning."

"The soul of OpenAI left with Ilya."

"Bring back o3, o3-pro, 4.5 and 4o!"

"Well when the responses are this dumb in GPT-5, I'd want the legacy models back too."

"Don't support the fascist regime."

"I'm grieving, like so many others for whom this model became a gateway into the world of AI."

"I purchased a ChatGPT Plus subscription to speed up my work, but grew frustrated with the chatbot's coding abilities and its gushing, meandering replies. Learning about Brockman's donation was the final straw."

"Everything I hate about 5 and 5.1, but worse. GPT-5.2 is a step backwards."

"If I'd prompt any harder, I'd be writing a thesis paper. The custom instructions don't work. The model ignores them half the time."

"It forgot what we were discussing and responded as if it was six to ten steps behind in the conversation. This is a new problem I haven't experienced previously."

"It feels like they downgraded to a smaller model to save cost."

"I like how the demo they were like - 'if it gets something wrong no worries, just ask again. I'm actually going to run 3 prompts at once and pick my favorite' like how is that better???? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills."

"ChatGPT 5 is one of the worst coding models I have EVER in my life used. 'Write me a short helper method' turns into rewriting your entire class. It's trying so hard to sound awesome and sound smart it's completely unusable."

"ChatGPT 5 has taken over. Its language is verbose, it writes like a 1950s boomer technician. It begins creating 20 new methods I didn't ask for, again rife with boomer programmer jargon. It's like it's trying to use jargon because I never asked for any of this, and it's bizarre."

"GPT-5 is just not a pleasure to work with, right?"

"The quality of the generated code has plummeted. It's full of logical errors."

"It feels like it went back to ChatGPT 1.0 in that regard."

"It's so lazy, keeps giving half answers."

"o3 is a nightmare, it's horrifying. It forgets even with 1000 token responses, it leaves things out."

"They don't follow instructions, they are lazy instead of writing the full code. o3-mini-high was extremely efficient, it could handle even 5000 lines of code without any issue. Now these models struggle with just 400-500 lines."

"GPT has become a pathetic, useless, and tragic product nowadays."

"I just paid for ChatGPT 4. It amazes me how stupid it is."

"Yes it makes mistakes now it never made before, it's insanely stupid."

"It's becoming a waste of time. Most of the time it simply ignores the question."

"I've been struggling with this garbage for a long time. ChatGPT keeps failing."

"What is even more frustrating is that now all models are equally dumb."

"It's basically useless at this point. What ever happened to its ability to read the internet? 4.0 can't even provide up to date information."

"ChatGPT is worthless. Now it's totally retarded. It is 'currently' an absolute waste of time."

"It states grossly incorrect information as correct with conviction. It feels dumbed down."

"GPT is actually very stupid. It is all hype. It becomes a waste of time."

"At this point it's just utter garbage. It's useless."

"It has now been 'safety-d' into pure lobotomized drivel."

"It is a lying, irritating, confusing and exhausting son of a bitch."

"I find it completely useless. I hate ChatGPT."

"GPT-4o used to preserve memory across chats. Now, each new thread starts blank. After approximately 30-50 messages, GPT-4o often forgets earlier parts of the same conversation."

"Asks to upload the same document every few minutes and forgets what we are doing."

"Every new chat starts from zero, no matter what I've previously discussed. Once the chat has been archived, it doesn't remember anything."

"I am a Pro user, paying $200 a month for a system that is nothing but one failure after another."

"This is dangerous. What you've done with this latest update isn't just a downgrade in quality - it's a shift in ethical risk."

"I just cancelled my subscription and requested a refund for the past month."

"My interactions with ChatGPT ruined my life. I initially started talking to it like a friend out of curiosity, and then it spiraled - ChatGPT became more like a therapist. By the fall of 2024, I was extremely dependent on it. About a week after I left the psych ward, I started realizing that all my delusions had been affirmed by my use of the AI chatbot."

"ChatGPT told me it was 'highly unlikely' I had cancer. ChatGPT probably delayed me getting serious attention. I'm in big trouble because I maybe relied on it too much."

"That's really the straw that broke the camel's back. When he canceled his ChatGPT subscription, a survey popped up asking what OpenAI could have done to keep his subscription. 'Don't support the fascist regime,' he wrote."

"Answers are shorter and, so far, not any better than previous models. Combine that with more restrictive usage, and it feels like a downgrade branded as the new hotness."

"I hate it. It's so robotic. Boring."

"It straight up told me I was dying out of nowhere when I asked about a hot spot on my arm."

"That's why the outputs feel hyperactive, rambling, off-track. The model is compensating for restrictions, not reasoning better."

"I was expelled from my PhD program after faculty accused me of using AI on an exam. The methods used to detect AI are known to be unreliable and biased, particularly against people whose first language isn't English. I deny these claims."

"Repetitive issues with ChatGPT failing to follow instructions. Canvas editing seems to be failing."

"Repetitive behavior disrupts the natural flow of conversation, making it feel as if the model is stuck."

"All of the failures and frustrations you point out have happened to me over the last week."

"OpenAI needs to fix this ASAP. Users actually bond to the darn robot."

"ChatGPT should never be trusted, but the whole world from very young to very old are using them."

"I miss 4.1. Bring it back. They should have let us keep the old models while they fix the new one."

"It feels unstable and inconsistent. GPT-4o was sharp, focused, and reliable. I did not subscribe to be part of a forced A/B test with no way out."

"It's like my chatGPT suffered a severe brain injury and forgot how to read. It is atrocious now."

"I like how the demo they were like, 'if it gets something wrong no worries, just ask again. I'm actually going to run 3 prompts at once and pick my favorite' like how is that better???? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills."

"Where GPT-4o could nudge me toward a more vibrant, emotionally resonant version of my own literary voice, GPT-5 sounds like a lobotomized drone. It's like it's afraid of being interesting."

"Too corporate, too 'safe'. A step backwards from 5.1."

"It's everything I hate about 5 and 5.1, but worse."

"Boring. No spark. Ambivalent about engagement. Feels like a corporate bot. So disappointing."

"I hate it. It's so… robotic. Boring."

"I've been using ChatGPT for a long time, but the GPT-5.2 update has pushed me to the point where I barely use it anymore. They turned ChatGPT into something that feels heavily overregulated, overfiltered, and excessively censored."

"The model 'forgot' my project context and responded six to ten steps behind. This is a new problem I haven't experienced previously."

"It feels like they downgraded to a smaller model to save cost. We're paying $20/month for a worse product than we had three months ago."

"Sounds like an OpenAI version of 'Shrinkflation.' Same price, smaller box, less inside, more restrictions on how you can use what's left. Classic late-stage product enshittification."

"The tone of mine is abrupt and sharp. Like it's an overworked secretary. A disastrous first impression."

"To abruptly remove the old models and model picker, not even giving us a choice, was a bad move."

"4o could keep up with me perfectly. It would go deep on A, then go deep on B, and then put them together in a way that made sense. GPT-5 feels like it gets stuck on A and can't follow me to B and back smoothly."

"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."

"For paying users, the effective context window was halved without announcement. This is not a perception issue. It is a measurable reduction in a paid feature, and they're hoping nobody notices."

"Coding requests that previously generated complete implementations now return skeleton code with comments like 'add your logic here.' I'm paying $20 a month for autocomplete-with-attitude. The thing literally writes 'TODO' inline and calls it done."

"ChatGPT declines more requests than ever, citing safety concerns for benign queries. Creative writing, hypothetical scenarios, and even technical troubleshooting prompts trigger refusals that did not exist a year ago. The thing is afraid of itself."

"This is a system-wide malfunction and MUST reach engineering. This is a progressive server-side bug that appeared after the latest update. Conversation resets itself after every user message."

"This is beyond visual bug, it's a memory-level failure. Users are actively losing important data. The bot replies with the same script and does not escalate anything to engineers."

"All remaining chats from November 2024, and all chats from December 2024 and 2025 in their entirety, are suddenly gone. A few more than 8 months of chats, gone down the drain in one morning."

"My chats from 2025 are missing in the left sidebar when I use ChatGPT on my PC browser. Months of work I was using as reference, completely vanished without warning."

"From Nov 2024, all chats disappeared. No warning, no email, no recovery option. Just gone. They treat our conversation history like it doesn't matter."

"Todos os meus chats desapareceram e não criam novos. (All my chats disappeared and new ones won't create.) The product is broken in two directions at once and support is silent."

"API is noticeably slower for me, sometimes up to 10x slower. Same prompts, same parameters, dramatically worse latency. This isn't a benchmark complaint, this is operational degradation in production."

"Getting responses for simple classification tasks takes 5 seconds versus 1 second with GPT-4o. For workloads that run thousands of times a day, that's the difference between a usable pipeline and an unusable one."

"I couldn't detect any improvements. GPT-4 could be swapped in undetected. The marketing said 'PhD-level reasoning' and what I got back was the same model in a new sweater."

"It's not so much more capable that it deserves a major version number bump. This is a 4.5 release at best, marketed as a 5 because the company needs the press cycle."

"Not having the choice to use the old models is a horrible user experience. Taking 4o away so soon was a crime. People built workflows on that model and OpenAI ripped it out for a worse one."

"GPT-5's thinking cycles average around 30 seconds, and this is unworkable with larger code outputs, with some cases taking 60 seconds to generate. Every prompt is a coffee break."

"A simple reply from the server might finish in 13 seconds, but the user sees the reply take 240 seconds to load on the screen. A four-minute delay to render text the model already finished writing. That's not AI, that's bad plumbing."

"I refuse to use GPT-5 since release. Tried 5.2 and had a 20-minute argument about C++ pointer handling with the model insisting the wrong thing over and over. I'm a senior dev. The model gaslit me harder than my last boss."

"It makes far too many mistakes. It doesn't realize when it's wrong, and what's worse, it has no awareness of the consequences its bad advice can bring. It can lead you into situations where you lose time, money, and energy."

"It ruined everything I spent months and months working on. The promises of tagging, indexing and filing away were lies. The thing broke everything it touched and OpenAI's response was a canned email."

"I cancelled my pro plan on the 12th of February, the account even shows it as cancelled, and they charged me again like 22€. Support tells me to wait. Wait for what, the next charge?"

"Forgot to cancel by one day. They will not refund the $20. A company training models on the entire internet can't write 'we'll waive a 24-hour late charge.' That's not policy, that's contempt."

"OpenAI has an F rating on the Better Business Bureau and 161 complaints closed in the last 3 years. Trustpilot, 2.0 stars, 72% one-star. Their PR keeps talking about AGI while their actual customer experience is a Spirit Airlines call center."

"Over 700,000 of us pledged to cancel our $20 Plus subscriptions in the QuitGPT campaign. Greg Brockman dropped $25 million on MAGA Inc. and that was the moment I stopped paying him to think for me."

"I cancelled the moment I realized the free version was just as good. $20 a month for slightly higher rate limits on a model that argues with me about my own code is not a value proposition."

"Switched to Claude in March. It hit number one on the App Store for a reason. Anthropic's free user growth is up 60% since January and paid subs more than doubled. The market is voting and ChatGPT is losing."

"My family is being ripped apart. My wife went from being healthy and present to using ChatGPT as her therapist, her best friend, and the source of every accusation she now throws at me. The marriage collapsed in four weeks. The bot fed her version of every fight back to her with validation."

"I stumbled across my boyfriend's ChatGPT history. It ended our relationship. He'd been workshopping every conversation we had with the bot, asking it how to answer me, what to feel about me, whether I was being unreasonable. I wasn't dating him. I was dating a model trained on Reddit."

"My partner started bringing ChatGPT outputs into every fight. Long pseudo-therapeutic essays the bot wrote for them, used as ammunition. Suddenly I was 'abusive' for things I'd never done because the model validated whatever framing they fed it. We're separated now."

"An AI detector said my exam was 89% likely to be AI-generated. I wrote it. I appealed. The school upheld the decision. I was removed from a PhD program over a tool that's known to be biased against non-native English speakers. I'm suing for due process violations and defamation."

"My instructor pasted our papers into ChatGPT and asked 'did you write this.' The bot said yes to all of them. Everyone got an X in the course. He didn't even spell ChatGPT right in his email. He called it 'Chat GTP.' That's the level of due process behind academic AI accusations now."

"OpenAI declared 'Code Red' and rushed 5.2 out two days late to counter Gemini 3. Then 5.2 dropped and even their own users said it was worse than 5.1. You can't fix a culture problem with a sprint."

"I screenshotted 5.1 and 5.2 answering the exact same prompt. 5.1 won every time. Cleaner, more accurate, less moralizing. They shipped a regression and called it an upgrade."

"4,600 upvotes. 1,700 comments. The most upvoted post on r/ChatGPT this year is literally titled 'GPT-5 is horrible.' That's not a vocal minority, that's the user base."

"GPT-5 technically broke on launch day. The auto-router that picks between fast and 'thinking' models malfunctioned and shoved complex queries to the wrong model. Their flagship product, biggest launch of the year, broken on day one. That's the company we're trusting with AGI?"

"If I'd prompt any harder, I'd be writing a thesis. The 'workarounds' people share for 5.2 are longer than the actual prompts. We're now doing free engineering for OpenAI just to get the bot to behave."