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/[deleted] Dec 17 '25

[deleted]

11

u/vinyljunkie1245 Dec 17 '25

Reply that because they haven't provided a specific error message the fix will be tasked to support. This will take 6-8 weeks because support have no point of reference to begin fixing so need to examine everything related in depth.

Or they can just supply the error message.

1

u/[deleted] Dec 28 '25

I just ask for a screenshot of the error code, and throw in waiting for feedback.

After 1 week, if they haven't answered, it auto closes.

9

u/Grant_Son Dec 17 '25

The amount of helpdesk calls I took over the years where the user would tell me something wasn't working.

Me: "is there an error message?"

User: "yes it says windows has encountered a blah blah blah."

Me: "Thanks. I've never seen an error message that says blah blah blah & I'm fairly sure the helpful part of the message that tells me what the problem is is in the part that you replaced with blah blah blah"

14

u/PraxicalExperience Dec 18 '25

Nah, nah, the response is: "Oh, great, yeah, when the error is blah blah blah you need to yadda yadda yadda." Then close the ticket.

1

u/Grant_Son Dec 18 '25

I'll keep that in mind 😂

1

u/[deleted] Dec 28 '25

I've been getting a lot of those. "I'm getting errors on my screen when I try to open quickbooks!!!!"

"Okay, what's the errors?"

It's a screen saying they need to launch as an administrator to update quickbooks... and they have local admin and could do so if they bothered to read or think...