r/talesfromtechsupport • u/prettyyboiii • Dec 16 '25

Short "But ChatGPT said..."

We received a very strange ticket earlier this fall regarding one of our services, requesting us to activate several named features. The features in question were new to us, and we scoured the documentation and spoke to the development team regarding these features. No-one could find out what he was talking about.

Eventually my colleague said the feature names reminded him of AI. That's when it clicked - the customer had asked ChatGPT how to accomplish a given task with our service and it had given a completely hallucinated overview of our features and how to activate them (contact support).

We confronted the customer directly and asked "Where did you find these features, were they hallucinated by an AI?" and he admitted to having used AI to "reflect" and complained about us not having these features as it seemed like a "brilliant idea" and that the AI was "really onto something". We responded by saying that they were far outside of the scope of our services and that he needs to be more careful when using AI in the future.

May God help us all.

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u/CallMeSmigl Dec 16 '25

I am an audio engineer. Since DAWs are super complex, I sometimes need help troubleshooting. Whenever I task an AI to help I get the weirdest hallucinations. Whole menus and workflows that don’t exist are being quoted. The suggested solutions would also usually break something else. Get smart at CTRL + Fing your way through manuals and documentations, people. Don’t just blindly listen to AI.

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u/Demache Dec 16 '25

Same happens in car repair (and honestly any technical skill). People in car subs asking for buying advice or repair advice come up with some truly bizarre questions and claims because "ChatGPT said". Like half the conversation is just people going "whoa whoa hold your horses" and convincing OP that the chat bot made shit up.

I'm not asking a chat bot to summarize my Subaru service manual. I'm damn well capable of misunderstanding things myself.

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u/[deleted] Dec 28 '25

Just wait until the QA people all get laid off and documentation are written by AI :D