Is ChatGPT Getting Lazy Or Does It Have the Winter Blues

Sometime in late November, ChatGPT users started to notice ChatGPT-4 was getting lazy, choosing to return overly simplified results or refusing to do tasks altogether.

Wait, what? This is starting to sound like human behavior. It sounds like ChatGPT is having a temper tantrum.

Seriously, though, OpenAI admitted there's an issue; they just aren't sure what it is.


The answer could be what some folks call the "winter break hypothesis." This is an unproven hypothesis, but the fact that it's being taken seriously by AI researchers demonstrates how bizarre AI language models have become. And quite frankly, it's a little concerning.

In a Tweet (X Tweet or whatever we're calling it these days) last week, the official ChatGPT account read, "We've heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier. We haven't updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn't intentional. Model behavior can be unpredictable, and we're looking into fixing it."

An X account called Martian suggested LLMs might mimic seasonal depression.

Another X'er, Mike Swoopskee, tweeted, "What if it learned from its training data that people usually slow down in December and put bigger projects off until the new year, and that's why it's been more lazy lately?"

Are we really having these conversations, and does nobody think it's weird that we are?

Research shows LLMs, like GPT-4, respond to "human-style encouragement, like telling it to relax before answering a question. Perhaps the suggestion that we get lazy this time of year inspires ChatGPT to follow suit. It makes sense to a lot of people.

Whether ChatGPT is mimicking human behavior or just experiencing some technical issues we don't know about is still up in the air, but it's encouraged many users to experiment with the AI model to try and prove or disprove the theory. So far, those experiments are inconclusive.

The idea that ChapGPT is displaying human-type behavior is both intriguing and scary. Is this just a glitch in technology, does ChatGPT want a raise, or is it the beginning of the rise of AI?

Stay tuned.

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