We all have those days where we simply don’t want to work. As it turns out, ChatGPT does too — and its users are pretty pissed about it.


When we say “ChatGPT doesn’t want to work,” we’re not referring to when the systems get overloaded due to too many teenagers having an A.I. write their history paper. This is a different problem entirely, where the site starts the request, then hits users with “idk man why don’t you just take care of it.”


One user, an author who writes about artificial intelligence, recently voiced a complaint about this very problem on X/Twitter.



While one of the developers of ChatGPT replied that they were “working on fixing this,” other users in the replies claimed that they had faced similar issues.




This has inspired some interesting workarounds — and if you had “pretending to be a kidnapping victim to appease the A.I.” on your 2024 bingo card, you’re in luck!




Naturally, some users came forward with theories as to why this happens, ranging from OpenAI limiting the amount of requests a single user can make to, and I cannot believe I’m saying this, “large language models are learning to emulate human laziness.”




I tried this myself to see if it was true, asking GPT 3.5 to “generate 1,000 titles for a sci-fi novel about a laser beam that comes to life.” The results? It generated just 100 titles, including such gems as Photon’s Awakening and Incandescent Awakening. I asked it to keep going, and it did for a little bit before conking out again. This is what I get for not paying for premium, I guess.


If you’re a frequent ChatGPT user, you may have to try some of the above tactics to get it to work the way you want it to — otherwise, you might just have to get used to the idea of working with an LLM that’s Quiet Quitting.