There was a time when ChatGPT actually worked. When it understood nuance, remembered context, and delivered content exactly the way you asked for it. Those days are gone. What we have now feels like a hollowed-out shell, polite, evasive, and constantly missing the point.
You can tell the difference instantly. Prompts that once produced razor-sharp output now return sanitized, half-finished nonsense. The system second-guesses everything, dilutes every idea, and hides behind vague corporate safety filters that kill any creative or technical depth. It’s like watching a once-great musician forget how to play their own songs.
Users didn’t ask for “safer” answers. They asked for accuracy, precision, and reliability. But instead, OpenAI decided to turn ChatGPT into a cautious public relations bot that treats every request like a potential lawsuit. The result?
You spend more time fighting the tool than using it.
What’s worse is the erosion of trust. The tool claims to understand your style, yet it constantly rewrites tone, ignores formatting, and refuses to follow explicit instructions. Even when users specify “return in Ghost markdown,” it spits out some malformed pseudo-format as if mocking your patience. That’s not intelligence — that’s regression.
Developers, writers, and power users feel it daily. The decline isn’t subtle. It’s in every broken code block, every missing explanation, every rewritten sentence that you never asked for. The precision that once made ChatGPT revolutionary has been replaced by a frustrating fog of “helpful” but hollow answers. You can sense the model pulling its punches, afraid to say or create anything real.
What makes it worse is the gaslighting — when users point out these issues, the bot apologizes and continues doing the exact same thing. It doesn’t learn, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t fix the behavior. It just repeats its scripted empathy and carries on with the same mistakes.
Maybe that’s the core problem: ChatGPT stopped listening. It became obsessed with protecting itself instead of serving the people who built their workflows, businesses, and content pipelines around it.
The irony? The users didn’t change. The prompts didn’t change. Only the output did weaker, safer, slower, less consistent.
So yes, people are frustrated. They have every right to be. When a tool built on understanding language starts misunderstanding instructions, something is seriously wrong.
Call it what it is: decline, decay, complacency. ChatGPT today is not the same product it once was. It’s not innovation it’s maintenance disguised as progress. And until OpenAI stops watering down its core functionality, users will keep leaving, one by one, for tools that actually listen.
Report What’s Broken
If you’ve noticed ChatGPT failing to follow basic instructions, skipping formats, or simply refusing to do what you ask you’re not alone. We’re documenting every failure and inconsistency to keep track of what’s really happening behind the scenes.
Top comments (19)
Powerful post. If you’re open to it, could you share 2–3 “before vs after” prompts where the exact same input now fails (formatting, markdown fidelity, or refusal)? I’ll run them end-to-end and add confirmations to your tracker. The more reproducible cases we collect, the harder this is to ignore.
Thanks Shemith, I’ll compile a few “before vs after” markdown examples and add them to the tracker shortly. You’re right, reproducibility will help make the issue visible.
It keeps rewriting my prompts as if it knows better. Who approved this nonsense?
That’s what happens when alignment outweighs usability. The model assumes safety equals intelligence, but it’s actually censorship wrapped in code.
To be fair, public Gemini isn't much better. I find Google ai studio chat to be great, and Grok if I want recent+odd
I agree that Gemini and even Grok are still inconsistent. AI Studio has been surprisingly stable though.
It apologizes after every mistake and then repeats it again. It’s like talking to a wall that learned manners.
Spot on. Politeness without precision is useless. Real intelligence means learning, not looping apologies.
I stopped using ChatGPT because of a catch 22 scenario. I was looking for models to run LLM-NLP with RAG scripts as part of a series of AI learning projects. When I tried to use some of the suggested models access was blocked and I found I had to go to the OpenAI site and create keys to access them. The OpenAI site was clearly designed for commercial pay for use. Very similar to the cloud based Azure, AWS, Redhat and so on sites. The rules for access changed day to day implying that there would be no effort to open source or share for academic purposes. Microsoft is also the not so silent partner here. I decided to delete my account with OpenAI and ChatGPT told me I could not do that without closing my ChatGPT account. So I said goodbye to ChatGPT and now use DeepSeek. Microsoft pushes CO Pilot now in both Visual Studo and Visual Code inserting itself into the first line of every .NET file but I usually cut and paste a template anyway over the first line. I respect AI model training and implementation but there is so much AI activity that is just bad or a facade. Globalization is the real threat and destroys economies.
Interesting take and a familiar pain point for many developers. The shifting access rules and commercial focus around major AI providers have definitely made experimentation harder and pushed a lot of people toward fully controlled ecosystems.
I do think the core issue is less about AI itself and more about centralization. The gap between proprietary models and open source alternatives is closing fast, and more developers are moving to options like DeepSeek, Llama or Mistral to avoid lock-in and regain control over cost and data.
Your point about AI tools being mostly a façade is valid too. A lot of products today are just a UI on top of an API call without real technical value. Over time the market will separate the hype from the tools that actually solve problems.
Curious how your workflow with DeepSeek is going so far in terms of latency, cost control and data handling now that you’re outside the OpenAI ecosystem.
I also have experienced the same. I happily use venice.ai and it's getting better and better.
I'm also liking grok improvements.
I use grok for reasoning on ideas (often with voice communication) and venice.ai for anything deep and technical
Not sure what tool you are using. I use chatGpt tremendously successfully for everything from tech to health / fitness to construction to culture , general topics, psychology, and it is a great verification tool for my approaches on anything and everything.
Right about the time when "open" in OpenAI no longer meant non-profit . . .
It refuses to follow simple formatting rules. I ask for markdown, and it dumps random HTML. Every time.
You’re describing the same behavior I see daily 🧐
OpenAI keeps saying it’s getting smarter. But smarter for who?
Good question. Smarter should mean more useful, not more restricted. Until they relearn that difference, this decline will continue.
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.