ChatGPT has become a part of everyday life for a lot of people, and while it’s good at a lot of things, there are some tasks that flummox the bot completely.
We all know that ChatGPT isn’t perfect. It makes mistakes, and there are questions it still can’t answer. However, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT aren’t likely to be terrible at the same things all the time. Regular users will have had instances where ChatGPT has answered a question incorrectly, or generated an image that defied the laws of physics.
But LLMs don’t give the same answer to the same question every time, the randomness is part of how they work. So while it’s a bad idea to rely on ChatGPT for advice on your relationship, finances, or health, that’s not because it’s incapable of giving correct answers. Mistakes aren’t common, but any misinformation is deadly serious if someone is asking about something as serious as hospital test results.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find tasks that ChatGPT is downright terrible at. We spent hours testing different functions that some users had reported issues with. We found that when it comes to many things, including changing conversational styles, transcribing text from images, and setting up regular reminders, ChatGPT is not terrible, which I’m sure is a relief to Sam Altman. However, there are some broad areas where ChatGPT is still not up for the job. Sometimes this is due to products being released before they’re properly ready, other times it’s because the promise of what AI can do is overhyped, and occasionally, it’s because the chatbot was simply never intended to work that way.Saving your work
If you log in to use ChatGPT — either with a free or Plus account — you’ll see a record of your conversation history on the left side of the screen. You can click any of these conversations to resume a past chat. You can also find old conversations by searching for keywords. With all these tools, you might think that ChatGPT is a safe place to store all the important dialogue that you’ve had with the bot over the last few years. You’d be wrong. While you might be able to see conversations from six months ago, they can be deleted at a moment’s notice — in fact, with no notice at all.
A professor at the University of Cologne in Germany found this out the hard way, when he made a change to his data settings and lost two years‘ worth of grant application templates, teaching material drafts, and exam result analyses. He contacted ChatGPT’s support team, and when he finally managed to get past the customer service bots and speak to a human, they confirmed that all the work that had disappeared was lost forever.
