When ChatGPT Invents Features: The Hilarious Perils of AI Hallucinations in Tech Support
Picture this: You’re sipping your morning coffee, bracing yourself for another day in tech support, when a ticket lands in your queue that’s so baffling it could only be a Monday. The customer wants you to activate several strangely-named features in your company’s service—features that sound perfectly plausible, perhaps even innovative, but absolutely do not exist. You check the documentation. Nothing. You ask the dev team. Blank stares. Have you collectively slipped into an alternate reality?
Turns out, you have—but not in the way you think. The culprit? Our friendly neighborhood AI, ChatGPT, spinning up an alternate universe where your product does things you’ve never even imagined.
When AI Dreams, Tech Support Screams
This isn’t science fiction or a hypothetical. It’s a real story from Reddit’s r/TalesFromTechSupport, courtesy of u/prettyyboiii, and it’s both hilarious and a little bit terrifying. The gist is simple: a customer, in earnest need of a solution, turned to ChatGPT for advice. The AI, ever helpful (and sometimes overly creative), responded with an entire feature set that simply did not exist. To add icing to the digital cake, it even instructed the customer to “contact support” to activate these imaginary features.
Cue the support team’s confusion. After a wild goose chase through documentation and Slack threads with developers (who probably wondered if they’d missed a memo), the mystery unraveled: the customer’s feature wishlist was AI-generated fiction.
The Hallucination Problem: When AI Gets Creative
AI models like ChatGPT are remarkable. They can generate code, write emails, even summarize dense technical papers. But as anyone who has spent more than a few hours with them knows, they have a fatal flaw: hallucination. In AI-speak, this means confidently making stuff up—sometimes plausible, sometimes wildly off-base, and always with the same calm authority.
For the uninitiated, it can be hard to tell where solid advice ends and enthusiastic invention begins. And so, our intrepid customer, armed with “insider knowledge” from ChatGPT, opened a ticket expecting some slick, as-yet-unreleased features. When the truth came out, he didn’t back down—instead, he said these hallucinated features seemed like a “brilliant idea” and that AI was “really onto something.”
You almost have to respect the optimism.
The Double-Edged Sword of AI Advice
There’s a lesson here for everyone—techies and non-techies alike. AI is a phenomenal tool, but it’s only as reliable as the data it’s been trained on. When it doesn’t know, it doesn’t say, “Sorry, I don’t know,” with the humility of a seasoned sysadmin. Instead, it takes its best guess, sometimes with the confidence of a toddler in a Batman cape.
For support teams, this means a new breed of tickets: ones where the customer’s expectations are set not by documentation, but by the fever dreams of a large language model. The result? Time lost, confusion sown, and a few more gray hairs for the tech support crew.
But let’s also give credit where it’s due. Sometimes, AI “hallucinations” spark genuine innovation. Maybe one of those imagined features actually would be a brilliant addition. Maybe support tickets like these will inspire the next killer feature. (Just maybe, though.)
How To Avoid Getting Catfished by ChatGPT
If you’re a customer, here’s your friendly PSA: always double-check your AI-generated advice, especially when it comes to complex or proprietary systems. If your AI helper tells you about a feature that seems too good to be true—or you can’t find it anywhere in the official docs—it probably lives only in cyberspace.
And if you’re on the tech support side? Buckle up. The future holds more tickets like this. Consider adding “AI hallucination wrangler” to your resume. Maybe even pitch a new role at your next team meeting: “Official AI Dream Interpreter.”
The Takeaway (and a Plea for Sanity)
As AI tools like ChatGPT become more embedded in our workflows, we’re all going to need a little more skepticism, a little more patience, and—above all—a good sense of humor. Because when your support queue starts filling up with requests for features that only exist in the Matrix, laughter might be the only way to keep your sanity intact.
So, the next time “ChatGPT said…” comes up in your support tickets, take a deep breath, grab your coffee, and remember: you’re not alone. May God help us all.
Have you ever had an AI hallucinate features (or solutions) that left you scratching your head? Share your stories below—let’s commiserate and maybe even inspire the next great (real) feature together!
Original Reddit Post: 'But ChatGPT said...'