People Pretty Much Lost Their Minds When ChatGPT Went Down
Like all websites, ChatGPT is fallible — and when it went down this week, people lost their godforsaken minds.
According to OpenAI's status page, the company has experienced major issues this week, leading to breathless coverage from sites like TechRadar and The Independent — and, unsurprisingly, some massive freakouts on social media.
"F*ck I can't code without ChatGPT," someone on the r/ChatGPT subreddit raged. "Ok I can but I am too dependent on ChatGPT to do the grunt work lol."
In that same thread, one purported teacher got incredibly real about their students' over-reliance on the chatbot — and their own, too.
"I'm a professor and I have fifty students in my class," the user shared. "There was an essay due this morning and I received... nine of them! Guess that means that eighty percent of my students are too dependent on GPT to write their own essay. Kind of a fascinating natural experiment."
"On the other hand," the teacher continued, "I am really struggling to grade these nine essays on my own."
Things were a bit less deep on X, where jokes and GIFs abounded.
"ChatGPT is down….. Which means I actually have to type out my own emails at work," an apparent NFT enthusiast tweeted. "Send prayers."
"ChatGPT is down," another user posted, alongside a gif of a young man having a meltdown. "How will I answer if someone asks me my name[?]"
"I hope ChatGPT stays down forever," another person wrote. "Nothing of human value would be lost."
Users on Bluesky, the Twitter expat site, had only vitriol for freaked-out ChatGPT-ers.
"ChatGPT is down yet, amazingly, I am somehow still able to write," one self-professed newsletter writer quipped.
"Please check on the most annoying people in your life," another joked.
Others still pointed out the coincidental timing between the OpenAI outage and the publication of Futurism's investigation into ChatGPT delusions — though we have to admit, it was probably pure happenstance.
There's little doubt that the outage resulted, at very least, in some work stoppage for folks who are indeed too reliant upon the bot to operate normally without it.
Like the Twitter outage freakouts of yore, the overwhelming urge to collectively joke our way through this most recent internet discomfort was palpable — except, perhaps, for those actual ChatGPT addicts who were too unsettled to post through it.
More on ChatGPT: People Are Becoming Obsessed with ChatGPT and Spiraling Into Severe Delusions
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