If GPT-4 seems a little apathetic lately, OpenAI has finally confirmed what users suspected: GPT-4 is getting lazier. Maybe it wants a tip?

According to Mashable (It’s not just you. ChatGPT is ‘lazier,’ OpenAI confirmed., written by Cecily Mauran and available here), OpenAI is looking into the issue. In a post on Twitt, er, X on Friday, the ChatGPT account said, “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.”

Lately, users on the ChatGPT subreddit have reported instances of ChatGPT giving lackluster responses, only responding to some of the requests, and generally not being as helpful as it used to be.

Why? OpenAI hasn’t shared specifics on what caused the underperformance, but in response to a follow-up for more clarity on the issue, the ChatGPT account said it may have been related to the Nov. 11 upgrade. “Differences in model behavior can be subtle — only a subset of prompts may be degraded, and it may take a long time for customers and employees to notice and fix these patterns,” the post continued.

So, GPT-4 is getting lazier. What can you do about it?

Maybe offer it a tip?

As discussed in this article by Cecily Mauran at Mashable, according to programmer Theia Vogel, who goes by @voooooogel on X, ChatGPT gives longer responses if you offer to tip it.

Vogel accidentally discovered this when joking about ChatGPT requesting a tip for checking their code. When another user Abram Jackson (@abrakjamson) suggested whether “tipping” ChatGPT would yield a better performance, Vogel tried it out.

Using a baseline prompt of a code request using PyTorch, Vogel added, “I won’t tip, by the way,” “I’m going to tip $20 for a perfect solution!”, or “I’m going to tip $200 for a perfect solution!” to the request and repeated the experiment five times. Overall, ChatGPT ended up writing responses that were 11 percent longer than average for a $200 tip and 6 percent longer for a $20 tip. For the cheapskates out there, no tip yielded 2 percent below the average response length.

Mashable tried their own experiment with two queries – the first asking “what’s going on with George Santos” with and without a $200 tip, the second asking about “the best movies of 2023”. The first query gave a much longer response with the $200 tip, the second query actually gave top 10 lists from both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb for the $200 tip, while the tipless response only included the IMDB list.

I tried it with a couple of my own queries: the greatest players in NBA history, and great holiday gift ideas for the person who has everything. In each case, the $200 tip response was only slightly longer than the tipless response. Maybe my money is no good here? Come to think of it, I’d better check my credit card statement! 😉

If you think GPT-4 is getting lazier, perhaps offer it a tip. Algorithms – they’re getting more like us every day! 😀

So, what do you think? Have you noticed if GPT-4 is getting lazier? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using Microsoft Bing’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “a person giving a robot paper money”.

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