ChatGPT didn't get worse — we just outgrew it

OpenAI first took the world by storm back in 2022 with the debut of ChatGPT, and it has been my go-to AI chatbot for nearly four years now, helping me grind through college, brainstorming ideas, and planning everyday tasks to become more productive.

However, recently I’ve been inclined to move to other options, as ChatGPT started feeling redundant to me. More often than not, I found myself disappointed with the answers it gave me. What I eventually realized was that ChatGPT didn’t get worse; I just outgrew it.

This chatbot makes me wonder why I ever used ChatGPT

ChatGPT is still a great choice, but for some folks, there’s a better chatbot solution worth considering.

ChatGPT hits a wall

It is struggling to keep up with me

ChatGPT study mode on an iPhone — Amir Bohlooli / MUO

All AI chatbots share the same linear structure, and by that, I mean that conversations don’t really branch out. Still, other AI chatbots are lenient about returning to past prompts and shifting to newer ones, whereas ChatGPT feels more rigid to me than Claude. For some reason, ChatGPT’s responses seem to stick to the first prompt, which is why I can’t really develop a chat to link multiple concepts together, and it gets frustrating. The analysis of prompts is also surface-level, and most of the time, it misses the point entirely. At this point, the model should be sufficiently trained to handle nuanced prompts, but that certainly isn’t the case. Sure, ChatGPT is great for simpler tasks, but on a creative level, I see limited progress since it first debuted.

There’s more to why I’m so displeased with ChatGPT right now. The answers to my prompts are often more generic than those of an AI chatbot. Not to mention the inaccurate information I get provided, which is okay since AI chatbots can make mistakes, but this has happened way too many times with ChatGPT. Even in terms of feedback, ChatGPT has two modes: it either praises subpar work to keep you happy, or it nitpicks so aggressively to the point where your idea ends up a long way off from what it was intended to be.

Maybe I expected too much

Comparison is the thief of joy

The ChatGPT app for Android on a Pixel 10 Pro.

When ChatGPT first debuted, it was alluring — it offered more than one would expect from an assistant — and, for most, it was a strange technology that nobody could get used to in the first few months. It has been a part of my life for quite some time now, and I practically invested in it, feeding it all sorts of data, helping me make decisions and improve myself, whether for work or personal matters.

Unfortunately, as I got more and more used to ChatGPT, I got smarter with my prompts, started asking for more, and the chatbot just couldn’t keep up. It isn’t that ChatGPT got worse; I feel like it’s more about what I compare it to than how it actually felt in the beginning. The wow factor disappeared because I expected it to keep up with me. Meanwhile, other chatbots like Gemini and Perplexity debuted with major advancements, and while OpenAI did make some developments, it just wasn’t the same.

Alternatives like Claude are much better

Claude doesn’t beat around the bush

Recently, there has been a trend of shifting to other chatbots beyond ChatGPT because, frankly, I’m not the only one who has complaints about it. Anthropic’s Claude has seen a massive surge recently, and for the right reason. Claude AI is actually great, and I was surprised by how good it was. Remember that I mentioned earlier in this article that I invested nearly four years into ChatGPT? Fortunately, that isn’t going to waste now that I have been able to move my entire context to Claude by following these steps.

With regards to how good Claude is, I found it to be a much better listener compared to all the AI chatbots I’ve used, and sometimes, that’s all you need. No matter how big a prompt you feed it, Claude doesn’t ignore you, and almost every time, the answer I got was adequate. It is vastly creative in writing, unlike ChatGPT, which can get pretty monotonous. Even with problem-solving, Claude gets the work done without needless detours, whereas I had to literally nudge ChatGPT into providing a satisfactory answer. Not to mention that the feedback I got was actually positive, since it engaged with my actual argument rather than forcing me to steer in a different direction. To summarize, comparing them both, I found out that ChatGPT gives you the answer you’d want to hear, but Claude actually pushes back with its reasoning, which is what I need.

Developer: Anthropic PBC
Price model: Free, subscription available

Claude is an advanced artificial intelligence assistant developed by Anthropic. Built on Constitutional AI principles, it excels at complex reasoning, sophisticated writing, and professional-grade coding assistance.

Don’t get me wrong, ChatGPT isn’t that bad

OpenAI set the bar so high initially that it just couldn’t keep up with expectations later on, which is why it became so easy to criticize ChatGPT. It is still the most used chatbot worldwide, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. The free version is great, and there’s not much you’ll miss out on that plan unless you have bigger workloads. For studying, ChatGPT is great, but I’m at a point where the chatbot is something I’ve outgrown. My needs have grown beyond what ChatGPT can provide, and I don’t want something that has to be hand-held to give me the right answers.