Comment by rpeden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpeden | Hacker News Reader

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I'm appalled by how dismissive and heartless many HN users seem toward non-professional users of ChatGPT.

I use the GPT models (along with Claude and Gemini) a ton for my work. And from this perspective, I appreciate GPT-5. It does a good job.

But I also used GPT-4o extensively for first-person non-fiction/adventure creation. Over time, 4o had come to be quite good at this. The force upgrade to GPT-5 has, up to this point, been a massive reduction in quality for this use case.

GPT-5 just forgets or misunderstands things or mixes up details about characters that were provided a couple of messages prior, while 4o got these details right even when they hadn't been mentioned in dozens of messages.

I'm using it for fun, yes, but not as a buddy or therapist. Just as entertainment. I'm fine with paying more for this use if I need to. And I do - right now, I'm using `chatgpt-4o-latest` via LibreChat but it's a somewhat inferior experience to the ChatGPT web UI that has access to memory and previous chats.

Not the end of the world - but a little advance notice would have been nice so I'd have had some time to prepare and test alternatives.

A lot of people use LLMs for fiction & role playing. Do you know of a place where some of these interactions are shared? The only ones I've found so far are, well, over-the-top sexual in nature.

And I'm just kind of interested _how_ other people are doing all of this interactive fiction stuff.

I have some science-fiction story ideas I'd love to flesh out. However, it turns out that I'm a terrible writer, despite some practice at it. Also, I can never be surprised by my own writing, or entertained by it in the same way that someone else's writing can.

I've tried taking my vague story ideas, throwing them at an AI, and getting half a chapter out to see how it tracks.

Unfortunately, few if any models can write prose as good as a skilled human author, so I'm still waiting to see if a future model can output customised stories on demand that I'd actually enjoy.

Sure. Here is the fanfiction book I've been using LLMs to help me write. Helps a lot with improving prose and identifying plot holes. It's much better then a rubber duck for talking out how to improve a chapter and write plausible story arcs. It's not great at word smithing, but I find it errs on the side of too many similies and metaphors, so I just delete some of them as I copy the suggestions over into my draft.

https://github.com/frypatch/The-Price-of-Remembering

(I'm looking at the paragraph after FORWARD.) You should cut down on the sentences with commas. The flow stops and starts way too often.

Thank you for your feedback. I've rewritten the "Forward" to apply your suggestions and will keep them in mind when writing and improving chapters in the future.

I am not sure which heartless comments you are referring to but what I do see is genuine concern for the mental health of individuals who seem to be overly attached, on a deep emotional level, to an LLM: That does not look good at all.

Just a few days ago another person on that subreddit was explaining how they used ChatGPT to talk to a simulated version of their dad, who recently passed away. At the same time there are reports that may indicate LLMs triggering actual psychosis to some users (https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/delusions-b...).

Given the loneliness epidemic there are obvious commercial reasons to make LLMs feel like your best pal, which may result in these vulnerable individuals getting more isolated and very addicted to a tech product.

> I do see is genuine concern for the mental health of individuals

I think that is going to be an issue regardless of the model. It will just take time for that person to reset to the new model.

For me the whole thing feels like a culture shock. It was rapid change in tone that came off as being rude.

But if you had that type of conversations from the start it would have been a non-issue.

The place we still call America for illogical reasons is a broken society in seemingly finals stages of its existence. Of course broken people will glom onto yet another digital form of a drug that gives an impression of at least suppressing the pain they feel for reasons they do not understand.

It is little more than the Rat Park Experiment, only in this American version, the researchers think giving more efficient and various ways of delivering morphine water is how you make a rat park.

" a broken society in seemingly finals stages of its existence."

Please tell me what comes next then?

I don't live in this broken place you speak of and don't feel the pain you mention.

Outside of work I sometimes user LLMs to create what amounts to infinitely variable Choose Your Own Adventure books just for entertainment, and I don't think that's a problem.

Yes. I understand that. Most of us are totally detached and solely unaware of what goes on outside of the bubble we are in. Very few of us actually try to find out what is going outside of the walls of Versailles.

Personally, I prefer GPT-5 than 4o. It does a good job. But like many others I don't like the sudden removal because it also removed O3, which I sometime use for research based task. GPT-5 thinking mode is okay, but I feel O3 is still better.

Then you learned a valuable lesson about relying on hidden features of a tech product to support a niche use case.

Carry it forward into your next experience with OpenAI.

I don't think chat context and memory count as "hidden features"

Does their consumer product make any guarantees about preserving your chat context from version to version?

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