Yeah, for me it was just on step too far. I was trying to ask questions on a board about a niche topic for my book and I was deleted. I messaged the mods and they told I was leeching off of them for free buzz and I wouldn’t get approved. Meanwhile I posted on another board about the same topic and everyone was super friendly and was really excited a normie was asking questions. I realized that over my time on reddit, I’ve developed this massive anxiety about posting. Most of these subreddits I frequented have hundreds of rules, and dozens of sub rules under each.
So I’d inevitably get deleted and harassed by the mods because of things like, having the tags on the wrong side of the title, posting more than 3 times in a week, including the three dots thing (…) somewhere in my post, or my favorite, referring to the users as ‘the hive mind’. That last one got me banned from several subs by this power mod. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve spent all night trying to get approved to no avail (I’m very persistent when I need information). Just to when I finally arrange all of the words to be in the right order for the tyrants to approve me. Just to get downvoted into oblivion and people spamming me with all manners of insults and treating me like an idiot. Fuck spez and fuck reddit.
Phew! Sorry, didn’t mean to dump that on you. Like I said, today was the last straw for me. Anxiety is dropping, finally.
A lot of people are talking about the privacy aspect (like you mention in your post) a lot better than me, so I wanted to share the main issue I’ve had with ChatGPT. It’s an idiot. It can’t follow basic instructions and will just repeat the mistake over and over again when you point it out. It’s uninspired and uncreative and will spit out lame, great value brand names like “The Shadow Nexus”, “The Cybercenter”, “The Datahaven”. I used to be able make it give good names when giving it example names but doesn’t work anymore. I’m writing cyberpunk fic, and I needed help with a hacker group name, and it came up with the Binary Syndicate which is pretty good. Now it comes up with “Hacker Squad”, “The Hacker Elite”, “The Hackers”. I don’t want it to write an entire book for me, but sometimes I need help with scene that require more technical knowledge than I have. It’s prose was really good when you fine tune it a little. Now it’s flat, bland, and boring. I asked it to write a scene about someone defusing a bomb and it basically was a two sentence scene that explained nothing on how he defused it. I asked it to make it longer and explain how he defused it and it saw “He opens the case and utilizes a technique known as ‘wire tracing’. He traces the wire and cuts it and the bomb is defused. The hacker is so relieved.” See how flat that is? How mechanical? I use Claude for creative writing but it’s not much better.
Claude is so censored that writing anything that sounds even nonoscopically criminal it freaks the hell out and lectures you about being ethical. For instances it wouldn’t help me write a scene about a digital forensic analyst at the FBI wiping a computer (because it encourages harm). So you can only imagine how it reacted when I asked it for help writing about my vigilante hacker character and my archeologist posing as a crime lord smuggler secretly dismantling black market trades in the middle east. You have to jailbreak it (which is a little bit less hard than hacking the Pentagon!) and eventually it goes all love guru on you and starts monologuing about light and darkness and writing inspiring uplifting tales blah blah blah.
Honestly, what I’m saying is that ChatGPT is pretty dumbed down, but I’ve heard of a lot of people who’ve noticed no difference. You could be one of them. If you’re using it for creative writing, use Claude and good luck with the prompt engineering attempting to jailbreak it.