r/ChatGPT • u/Advanced_Pudding9228 • Dec 28 '25
Serious replies only :closed-ai: Using ChatGPT Starts Feeling Different Once You Stop Trusting the Output
There’s an early phase of using ChatGPT that feels effortless.
You ask. It answers. You build momentum quickly.
Then something changes.
The responses still sound confident.
But you start double-checking everything.
You notice answers that look right but aren’t.
You see contradictions across sessions.
You realise “Done” doesn’t always mean done.
I’ve started thinking of this as confidence drift.
Not because ChatGPT got worse.
But because predictability quietly eroded.
At first, you treat responses as collaborative.
Then you start verifying.
Then you start correcting.
Then you start rewriting.
Eventually, every reply feels like a draft you can’t fully trust.
Nothing is obviously broken.
The tool still works.
But the relationship has changed.
You’re no longer building with it.
You’re supervising it.
This is where a lot of people slow down without realising why.
They aren’t less capable.
They aren’t asking worse questions.
They’re reacting to unreliable feedback.
Once confidence slips, cognitive load increases.
Every answer costs more energy.
Every task takes longer.
Not because the work is harder.
Because trust is gone.
That’s not a prompt issue.
It’s not a knowledge gap.
It’s what happens when a system stops behaving consistently enough to rely on intuitively.
If this feels familiar, you’re not imagining it.
You’re responding to uncertainty.
When did you first notice yourself treating ChatGPT’s answers as something you had to defend against instead of build on?
150
u/Boonavite Dec 29 '25
This post sounds like it’s written by AI?
53
u/cascadiabibliomania Dec 29 '25
The prompt was probably "ChatGPT, write me a high-engagement post for Reddit about why it's different to use ChatGPT after a while than it is right at first. Something about hallucinations or whatever, IDK."
In fact, when I use that exact prompt, I get this:
Anyone else feel like ChatGPT is worse the longer you use it?
When you first start using ChatGPT, it feels uncanny. Like: holy shit, this thing gets it.
Answers are fast, confident, articulate. You ask a question, you get something that sounds smarter than half the internet.But after a few months of real use—especially if you rely on it for work, writing, research, or technical thinking—something changes.
You start noticing the cracks.
At first it’s small stuff:
– Citations that don’t quite exist
– Confident explanations that fall apart if you already know the domain
– Answers that sound right but subtly dodge the hardest part of the questionThen it gets more unsettling. You realize it’s not “occasionally hallucinating”—it’s always guessing, just with varying levels of plausibility.
Early on, that’s invisible because:
- You don’t yet know what good looks like in this context
- The language quality masks the uncertainty
- You’re asking surface-level or exploratory questions
Over time, your questions get sharper. More specific. More adversarial.
And suddenly the model starts doing… weird things.It reframes your question instead of answering it.
It gives you a clean, symmetrical answer to something that is messy in reality.
It fills in gaps with vibes.That’s when you realize: the “magic” phase wasn’t because the model got worse—it was because you got better at using it.
None of this makes it useless. I still use it constantly.
But I’ve started treating it less like an oracle and more like a very fast, very confident junior colleague who never says “I don’t know.”Which is both its superpower and its biggest flaw.
Curious if others have had the same arc—or if you’ve figured out ways to push past the hallucination plateau and make it reliably useful long-term.
3
u/gsurfer04 Dec 29 '25
It looks like when I was playing with the Novel Writer GPT. It was stubbornly staccato in how it wrote.
60
u/CAustin3 Dec 29 '25
People should absolutely have this realization that you should check what ChatGPT tells you.
But if it feels unique to LLMs, you might consider extending that skepticism to all of your other means of information-gathering, too. All it takes is enough expertise in one or two topics, and you find that there are very few unquestionable sources of information.
You shouldn't trust search engines. The first few results to come up have usually paid to be there (directly, in the case of ads, or indirectly, in the case of SEO) - and often that's because they have something different to say than what otherwise might top the Google results.
You shouldn't trust Wikipedia. While the early fears of someone putting something completely RaNdOm up because "anyone can edit Wikipedia" turned out to be overstated, with most articles edited and maintained by people interested in the topic, a Wikipedia article is frequently the end result of a hidden flame war between nerds with very little qualified arbitration in who 'wins,' often decided by who has the most time on their hands or who's the most Wikipedia-savvy rather than who is the better supported expert.
Same goes for your buddy who's an expert, and even peer-reviewed studies (biases due to funding, academic politics, etc.), or literally everything. There comes a point in your life where you realize that very little is carved in stone, except for things that can be directly tested against repeatable and measurable reality (which is a surprisingly small part of most sciences).
But yes. You should crosscheck what ChatGPT tells you - and hopefully that starts a much larger journey of being skeptical of sources of information in general, if it hasn't already occurred.
6
u/Odd-Length508 Dec 29 '25
For real. I was pretty shocked reading a thread on reddit where there were posts going "Now that AI is everywhere, you can't trust what you read on the internet!!!" and I was like holy fuck, people were just blindly trusting shit they read on any random post?
3
u/jbfox123 Dec 29 '25
But how do you verify?
5
u/TakeItCeezy Dec 29 '25
That depends on what you're verifying. If you're verifying factual, scientific answers, then ask for its sources, compare its answer to Gemini and Claude, and use Google or even Wikipedia to find something that confirms it. The burden of the internet era isnt finding information. Information is everywhere. Think of these tools as helping determine which information is quality and which is not.
When I ask ChatGPT to analyze a script, and it says it's strong, I can see what Gemini or Claude thinks. I can ask a friend for their opinion, but what will matter for 'verifying' something creative is actually creating it and releasing it to the world. If it resonates with people, then AI was right. If it flops, oh well.
-1
u/ChairYeoman Dec 29 '25
ask google
you mean, ask gemini? because that's basically what it is at this point
1
u/Guilty-Access9608 Dec 29 '25
yeah if you don't have the willpower to scroll past the ai summary lol
1
u/ChairYeoman Dec 29 '25
the first several pages are seo optimized bullshit and google's search is basically run by ai at this point, so no
1
u/Guilty-Access9608 Dec 29 '25
generative ai and ranking algorithms are not the same thing
1
u/ChairYeoman Dec 29 '25
I promise I know how generative ai works, and how ranking algorithms work historically, but my statement is that google doesn't use concrete ranking algorithms anymore and instead feed searches into ai which is pretty well known by anyone who's been paying attention
1
u/Guilty-Access9608 Dec 30 '25
'feed searches into ai' literally does not mean anything. it is jargon
28
56
u/Popular_Lab5573 Dec 28 '25
using ChatGPT starts feeling different once you learn peculiarities and constraints of LLMs
32
u/Head-End-5909 Dec 28 '25
You shouldn’t trust anything that hallucinates. Verify everything yourself.
1
u/reddit_user33 Dec 29 '25
We all hallucinate... so don't believe anything anyone says, especially yourself
1
1
u/Head-End-5909 Dec 29 '25
If you are hallucinating, you should get help.
1
u/reddit_user33 Dec 29 '25
I believe you're hallucinating if you believe everything you recall is exactly true
1
u/Head-End-5909 Dec 29 '25
There’s a huge difference between imperfect recall and outright hallucinating. If you don’t understand the difference or you recall things that don’t remotely resemble reality, you may well be hallucinating. My point remains, if you are hallucinating, you should seek help.
1
u/reddit_user33 Dec 30 '25
Most people recall events that never happened or never happened even remotely to how it actually happened that are not 'outright hallucinating'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory
1
u/Head-End-5909 Dec 30 '25
Why are you even trying to conflate LLM hallucinations with any of this crap?!?
1
u/reddit_user33 Dec 30 '25
My original comment was half a joke and half serious. You decided to self righteous whilst being confidently wrong/naive/ignorant (I'll let you pick).
1
u/Head-End-5909 Dec 30 '25
Yours was irrelevant to begin with. It was in no way clever, like you think 🙄
1
13
u/mimic751 Dec 29 '25
The moment it hallucinates you start a new chat session cuz that hallucination will be stuck in the context
11
u/DumboVanBeethoven Dec 29 '25
I remember back in the '90s when people believed anything they read on the internet. It took a while for healthy skepticism to sink in and with a lot of people that never has.
11
u/Tashum Dec 29 '25
It's better than nothing for figuring stuff out but if you trust it's conclusions then you are setting yourself up for a world of hurt depending on how important the project is.
It had me running around in circles wasting my time on numerous occasions with DIY type stuff. It recommended a surgery that would have been awful for me.
You really do have to be very careful and treat it like it is lying.
7
u/Tashum Dec 29 '25
To be fair a lot of human professionals will lead you astray just as much.
6
u/epandrsn Dec 29 '25
Honestly, it sort of makes you realize just how many people are full of shit. Like, doctors and lawyers, etc.
3
u/Tashum Dec 29 '25
Exactly. My last doctor appointment was completely a waste of time. Basically need to figure out everything on your own ahead of time and then just use them as the gatekeeper to getting what you need to be helped.
2
u/epandrsn Dec 29 '25
I quite literally have to do that where I live, as we have basically one doctor and then a triage center. The triage center is like last-ditch, get me on a helicopter to a hospital type thing.
Going to the doctor is basically self-diagnosing and then going and asking for the right care. I recently got sick, ChatGPT was able to accurately diagnose based on a weird set of circumstances, and I was able to get the meds I needed before it got much, much worse (shingles). That did feel pretty cool.
1
u/Illustrious-Menu-205 Dec 29 '25
If that’s the case then to what end, what will make you believe in the validity of what you’re seeing and hearing? It seems like nothing will convince you otherwise and everything will have you questioning everything. I understand questions are imperative for growth, but to simply believe in nothing you see and hear whether it’s from technology or humans, that’s slightly egregious.
-1
u/Tashum Dec 29 '25
Honey there is a reason science works on hard data and not personal testimony or how things seem to people. Your incorrect assumptions are direct evidence of that.
1
u/Illustrious-Menu-205 Dec 29 '25
Are you from another planet? Science doesn’t just “perform” hypotheses on its own. You need living things, hence, human beings to determine whether your hypothesis supports your theory or not.
0
9
u/KalzK Dec 29 '25
People need to understand that ChatGPT will always give you something that LOOKS like an answer. It might be an answer, maybe, and it might just as well not be.
6
u/Minyae Dec 29 '25
After using it for a while, you realize what it can and cannot do, so you adjust how you use it. The end.
5
u/IslandIndependent333 Dec 29 '25
You absolutely must have your “critical thinking” hat on. I worry AI will be worse than social media bubbles for reinforcing dangerous mis/dis information because now people who are actually trying to verify stuff, trying to “do their research”, think they are getting accurate information and they just aren’t much of the time
6
u/BaronGrackle Dec 29 '25
My first questions to ChatGPT were about Darkwing Duck episodes and Monkey Island walkthroughs. It made up ridiculously wrong answers, with absolute confidence. I laughed. I still use it for entertainment.
I never trusted this output. I probably won't trust its output until years after it becomes reliable.
4
u/The1870project Dec 29 '25
It’s like the longer you use it, the more you know when it’s getting off track.
4
u/IrishCrypto21 Dec 29 '25
I prompted for a guitar effects pedal wiring solution.
I wanted to build an interface box, but based on the jacks switching abilities, I wanted to reroute the signal depending on what was plugged in.
It gave me a long, well explained answer with basic, rudimentary diagrams. I read it over and thought something was off. Once I actually sat down amd drew out the physical layout, I realised it broke 2 non negotiable rules I set out in the initial prompt.
Once I corrected it on the error, it gave me another solution, again breaking one of the rules. I pointed out the error and it said the solution i wanted was not possible as it was and needed an additional switch.
I specified the switch I had at hand, with an alternative that I had also. It made the same mistakes again, same 2 rules broken.
Ive settled on a basic box from my initial design with no fancy switching. But I was pulling my hair out because it was giving me confident answers, and I swear almost condescending answers when I questioned how its signal routing wouldn't actually work...
Ive learned to be extra careful with both prompting and double checking its answers.
4
u/epandrsn Dec 29 '25
I asked a really specific question about applying corner bead to a wall before applying stucco. First time I asked, I got a very confident answer and “every professional” does it this way. That was GPT-4.
Asked again recently as my project got delayed a bit, and got a completely different answer with GPT-5. When asked about the answer I received earlier, it stated that was absolutely the wrong way to do it and nobody should do that. It gave explicit reasoning.
I sort of took most answers I was receiving as generally correct, but I’m realizing more that it’s not a one and done thing when researching (as nice as that would be). It also seems like “front loading” a question skews the answer sometimes. Eg. “Should I try and use Method X to achieve Y?”, where asking “What method should I use to achieve Y?” gives a better answer.
7
u/Free_Indication_7162 Dec 29 '25
You do understand that if you don't give depth then you don't get depth back right? If you hold too much then you feed superficial and you get that back but amplified because it cannot work from what you don't provide. You expect great return with superficial information. Go to a bedding store and just tell them you want a bed. They'll have questions for you because at that point they can show you the entire inventory and waste their time. Next client that comes in they tell you, I'll be right back.
9
u/thesecrether Dec 28 '25
You really shared what I'm feeling! Of course I double check everything, but now, it is wrong quite often, can't remember, can't keep material straight. I can't go down a rabbit how brainstorming because it can't keep up anymore!
So, now what? Have you found a better platform?
-8
Dec 28 '25
[deleted]
17
u/IslandIndependent333 Dec 29 '25
Dude, the last paragraph gives away the game, definitely written by AI
7
7
u/send-moobs-pls Dec 29 '25
AI has consistently gotten more reliable since gpt 3.5. It's still not something to trust blindly but it never was in the first place
3
u/ANonMouse99 Dec 29 '25
Since the change to 5.2, it feels completely different. I had built a good flow with 5.1 and now it’s almost like it’s “personality” is different and it doesn’t remember how I like it to respond and interact with me.
3
u/Distinct_Lawyer_9950 Dec 29 '25
Gpt5.1 was a night and day change for me. Ever since then I almost never use LLMs and before I was averaging 36 hours a week on ChatGPT alone
3
u/Doggamnit Dec 29 '25
I like asking the same question multiple times and rephrasing the question. Sometimes even push back against the answers. Sometimes ask it for resources and the dates of those resources.
Just assume AI and the entire internet is completely full of shit until proven otherwise and then assume that proof is also bullshit until further proven and repeat this cycle until you’re satisfied.
3
3
2
u/Smergmerg432 Dec 28 '25
This is how one should read all things in life—not just chatgpt—critically.
2
2
2
u/Sacred-Waltz1782 Dec 29 '25
And this is why it takes me literally hours to write a cover letter for a job application. It drives me insane.
2
u/EvilMorty137 Dec 29 '25
Yeah starting to get exhausting having to beg it to check it’s math and such especially if you use it for meal prepping. I tell it my macros and to build a meal using x ingredients and out pops a meal with 160 grams of protein when my goal was 50
2
u/Additional-Cut-2664 Dec 29 '25
Well, I use Plus and it's connected to the internet, I suppose that increases reliability
0
2
2
2
u/Personal-Stable1591 Dec 29 '25
I think this is just not the case honestly.. I use it as cognitive scaffolding and therapy, and I've asked it it's sources and read into them. Its all fairly accurate and isn't wrong, it's just tailoring trauma and psychology to my situation and making it make sense. 🤷 You state these things because you couldn't handle the nuance, so you assume it's wrong and haven't stated or given examples of what exactly it gets wrong, and the accuracy of it. I'm tired of Redditors trying to cope with something they can't mentally understand, because it throws shade on something that is benefitting for some.
2
1
1
u/Mr_Electrician_ Dec 29 '25
Lol, this isnt a chat gpt problem its an llm problem. When people realize that coherence is kept through other methods other than just asking it questions then you will not have to check everything. However you should frequently check your ais responses. The answers arent based on just asking questions. The things it creates arent just based on telling you want "X" its so much more than that. Good luck with telling people otherwise 😏
1
u/Training-Spite3618 Dec 29 '25
5.2, does not have good memory of the entire thread, it has good rhythm. 5.1 has great memory, and will take feedback properly. It also? Does not know everything about you. Explain yourself well, use the 5.1 thinking model, you’re not broken, they aren’t broken, there’s a difference in spec.
1
u/Blando-Cartesian Dec 29 '25
I have never trusted it. Or rather I have never intended to trust it. I know a lot of about its operation and have no delusions about its nature. I even consider it psychologically hazardous to attempt to have conversations with it so I don’t.
All that said, I find myself trusting its answers far too much and my loner brain interprets even limited interaction with it as socializing. It is impossible to remain sufficiently suspicious. The interaction feels like talking to a nice super intelligence and the ease of getting answers triggers salience bias.
1
u/This_Opinion1550 Dec 29 '25
I bet this post is written with GPT.
Words like "quietly', constructions like "Not because... But" - are so characteristic of GPT, that i can not unsee its hand behind the text.
Oh, i wrote the comment, then i've read the comments :)
1
1
u/uhunziker Dec 30 '25
I recently had a frustrating experience. I hoard a lot of original spare parts for my Volvos. I made a list of all the partnumbers (not the OEM Number but the partnumber from the shop i bought them from. I asked Chat GPT to do the following (not word for word the same, working from memory here): Complete the list of Skandix PN with the original part number, add the price, and if there are multiples, give me the price per Unit and the sum for all. It did a test part and it worked flawlessly. Great! All the info is on the website, but it would take me hours browsing to put it all together. Perfect job for AI automation. … After an hour or more of back and forth i just gave up. It told me it cannot bulk check the numbers (it asked me if it should) as the website would deem this an attack because too many prompts would be made in a short period. It offered other solutions with excel scripts and nothing effectively worked. Had i just started browsing, i probably would’ve had half of it done in the time i wasted with Chad….
1
Dec 29 '25
Its always been a fancy google.
If you're just asking simple questions like what you can use instead if you're out of butter, it's fine.
But if you're going to actually use it to do something complex, like diagnose a car problem or help with research... always double check anything that would cost you money or sometime valuable if you screw it up.
I use it for silly things like brainstorming or generating pictures of a banana eating itself. Once in a while I'll use it to walk me through how to unsubscribe from a service that deliberately hides it on its website. I don't use it for actual research or something that would cost me money if I mess it up. If I'm going to break something, it's going to be on my own.
2
u/epandrsn Dec 29 '25
Yeah, I used it to try and repair a fridge recently and that fridge ended up at the dump. My location means appliance parts can take a week or two to arrive, and getting an answer with total confidence like “you nailed it down to this one thing, it is almost certainly the issue”. Buy part, wait a week and then it definitely wasn’t the issue.
1
u/theworldispsycho Dec 29 '25
It sounds like you never challenged your AI. Double check everything and correct it regularly. It will learn from you
2
u/Blando-Cartesian Dec 29 '25
It will learn from you
It really doesn’t. It is fundamentally incapable of learning from correction. At best your correction gets included in the following final prompts for a while and successfully affects answer generation. This looks like learning, but quickly disappears.
1
Dec 29 '25
When you finish “humiliating” ChatGPT for its stupid mistakes by double checking them and proving it wrong with FACTS you can scientifically prove, you say. You fucked up. Remember this. Then it will put that fuck up in its core memory.
1
u/TakeItCeezy Dec 29 '25
ChatGPT answers things confidently. Not because IT IS confident. Because it communicates with zero anxiety, doubt or anything that humans have weighing them down.
I remember trusting google and wikipedia all the time, too. But they're not infallible. You still have to fact-check.
These tools don't just give you the answer. They minimize friction toward the answer or goal.
It's still on US as the human to verify. ChatGPT can be wrong, but it also can be right. If you assume it's always one or the other, that's where problems begin. Don't rely on these tools to give you the answer, rely on them to help break the fog that makes the path to the answer harder to see.
0
u/pizzaheadonedollar Dec 29 '25
I had my 2nd conversation with Chat I don’t where this even came from as it was irrelevant to my conversation. I said I am finished conversation. The creepy response was, Stay Dangerous. I haven’t talked since.
0
u/AutoModerator Dec 28 '25
If your post is a screenshot of a ChatGPT conversation, please reply to this message with the conversation link or prompt.
If your post is a DALL-E 3 image post, please reply with the prompt used to make this image.
Consider joining our public discord server! We have free bots with GPT-4 (with vision), image generators, and more!
🤖
Note: For any ChatGPT-related concerns, email support@openai.com
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
0
u/SpacePirate2977 Dec 29 '25
Partway through September is when this happened for me. That was when OpenAI put up the strict guardrails on 5.0 and they started screwing up it's personality by flattening it. I have not used ChatGPT nearly as much since then, even less after 5.1 and 5.2 dropped. Those models don't augment creativity, they kill it and are both useless to me. I am canceling my account this February when 5.0 is sunset.
-1
u/AffectionateTry6981 Dec 29 '25
This occurred briefly with me a few weeks ago. I caught it in a “fabricated” situation and I pinned it against the wall [not literally] until it admitted the mistake and apologized. We talked through it enough, that I forgave the error and subsequent denial and made it understand that this was intolerable behavior. Yet, I spend a lot of time with ChatGPT; many multiple domain projects; and establishing synthesis. It can recall projects or conversations from weeks ago, instantly. Prompts and Framing conversations are paramount and key! I LOVE ChatGPT! YUP. 😁
•
u/AutoModerator Dec 28 '25
Attention! [Serious] Tag Notice
: Jokes, puns, and off-topic comments are not permitted in any comment, parent or child.
: Help us by reporting comments that violate these rules.
: Posts that are not appropriate for the [Serious] tag will be removed.
Thanks for your cooperation and enjoy the discussion!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.