15 Hidden ChatGPT Limitations You Never Knew: Key Insights!

How do we find answers to most of our doubts? Yes, the internet comes to the rescue! With AI coming into play, finding answers has never been easier. You can enter your prompt, and voila! Among the many AI chatbots available, ChatGPT has become especially popular. However, there’s a catch: ChatGPT cannot give you 100% accurate information. Though it’s an open-source AI, ChatGPT has limitations. If you use it for your research or homework, you need to be aware of the drawbacks. To help you get the most out of ChatGPT, we will take you through the potential, limitations, and risks. We will also mention how you can approach the limitations of ChatGPT. 

What is the Potential of ChatGPT?

Open AI introduced ChatGPT in 2019, and this pre-trained AI has significantly changed things. It is not limited to answering questions but also gives you statistical data and conversations. There are many fun things to do with ChatGPT, such as writing an essay, planning a holiday, and whatnot! Before getting into the limitations of ChatGPT, let’s look at the tool's potential.

1. Influence of the education sector: ChatGPT has widely influenced the educational sector. It can break down complex topics, enrich texts, and answer questions about any field.
2. Picture production: It can help by giving well-written scenarios for picture production AIs.
3. Content generation: The chatbot helps in content formation. It can deliver the efficiency of ten articles into one within seconds, saving a lot of research time.
4. Technical & creative assistance: ChatGPT can help with SQL queries, summarise texts, teach, write like humans, scan images, and generate ideas for content.
5. Extensions for Chrome: You can use some of the best ChatGPT extensions for Chrome to write emails, summarise YouTube videos into texts, and more.  

What are the Limitations of ChatGPT?

ChatGPT can solve many problems, but there are a few cases where it becomes the problem itself. After all, when looking for solutions, you need to probe into the issues. That’s why we have added the most common ChatGPT limitations below. 

1. Lack of Common Sense

ChatGPT may produce impressive results quickly, but let’s not mistake it for a human being. A study by Anthropic, an AI company, found that AIs fail on over 30% of reasoning tasks. This means the lack of contextual awareness or common sense is one of the biggest limitations of ChatGPT – you cannot rely on it for facts and stats. You need to cross-check the generated responses and use your reasoning to overcome ChatGPT limitations. 

2. No Access to the Internet

Another one of ChatGPT limitations is its access to the internet. The AI cannot provide real-time information like the current currency rate to another. It provides data from previous years as it doesn't have access to the net. For anyone looking for updated, recent, or real-time information, the AI chatbot cannot offer. AI is a language processing tool, not a search engine like Google and Bing!

3. Limited Knowledge

One of the ChatGPT limitations is limited knowledge. It ties in with the abovementioned point about its access to the internet since ChatGPT can only pull information from the internet and not provide current information. It might have a huge reservoir of information, but less than humans. Sometimes, you might notice that ChatGPT cannot provide you with the answer you are looking for, especially if it relates to a recent event – it happens because the answer is not in its tank of information.               

4. Not a Multi-Tasker

A fairly known ChatGPT limitation is that it can't multitask. Also, it does not perform tasks like calculations and writing an essay in a row. This means that when you make multiple requests together, the AI cannot process them! You might have noticed this while using the AI itself, and this is one of the limitations of ChatGPT. The AI tool uses every request as a separate request and lacks an integrated working memory to manage different tasks. 

5. Lacks Creativity

A study from MIT found that the lack of being creative in a humanised way is one of the ChatGPT limits (ChatGPT itself agrees that this is a drawback!). It cannot think out of the box, and the creative outputs recombine patterns from its training data. For creative writing and original ideas, rely on yourself, hence! 

6. Lack of In-Depth Information

Due to the ChatGPT knowledge limit, the results do not offer in-depth information, one of the other ChatGPT limitations. Often, you may get incomplete information or irrelevant answers. When you ask for a detailed answer, all you get is a summary; sometimes, even these summaries can have the wrong information. To overcome such ChatGPT limits, you need to cross-check the sources.

7. Difficulty with Specialised Topics

One common ChatGPT limit is its inability to dig deep into specialised topics. The tool faces challenges regarding rare or specialised topics that don't have proper online data from which it has been trained. It can lead you to unnecessary results. ChatGPT is helpful for general knowledge, but its knowledge is limited to deep analyses. 

8. Biased Answers

The text data that ChatGPT is trained on can cause a problem since some data can contain biases and prejudices. This can unknowingly affect the answer and make the AI-generated answers with biases or discriminatory answers since it is not human! It is among the ChatGPT limitations since these answers can hurt someone emotionally. 

9. Cannot Understand the Context

Since ChatGPT can be used by students for writing cover letters or debugging codes, remember one thing. One of the ChatGPT limitations is its inability to understand context. It faces issues in understanding the context of many humans, like humour and sarcasm. If you add sarcasm to your query, ChatGPT might not understand it and give you a different answer altogether. 

10. Cannot Express Emotions

One of the obvious ChatGPT limits is that this AI model cannot express emotions! Since it is a computer, it cannot express emotions like humans; the AI will provide you with answers, but there won't be emotions behind the answers. If you ask it to write a short poem, you will get a poem, but it will be a poem without the emotions of a poet. So, it is safe to say that AI lacks emotional intelligence and thus cannot respond to complicated emotional experiences or situations.

11. Cannot Solve Complex Mathematical Problems

No matter how cool ChatGPT is with helping you solve mathematical problems, it faces glaring issues. One of the major limitations of ChatGPT that not many know of is that this AI cannot accurately compute complex mathematical problems. The chatbot can easily do your simple maths but provide it with multiple maths operations, which will be its end. It will either take too long to deliver or give you the wrong answer.  

12. A Need for Fine-Tuning

One of the major ChatGPT limitations is that you must fine-tune the AI model for some very specific cases when using it. Fine-tuning means training the model with a set of data to get the desired results and optimise it for the future. You need to be specific about the prompts and follow detailed or chain prompts to get the desired results. 

13. Grammatical Errors and Typos

The AI model's responses might be technically correct, but they might not be completely accurate in context or relevance. When processing complex or specialised information, where precision and accuracy are crucial, this limitation of ChatGPT can be especially difficult.

14. Accuracy Drops with Low-End System 

You might know of this limit of ChatGPT since this was a minor thing that not many noticed, but it does leave a huge impact! Running ChatGPT requires a lot of computational power, especially to receive the correct answers! If you have a slow PC or a low-end system, you may receive answers that are slow or wrong. There is also a decrease in accuracy and more. (You probably thought of it being an internet issue, but it is a limitation of ChatGPT)!

15. Incomplete Responses

By far, this is one of the common limitations of ChatGPT! When you ask the tool to write a long-form article, it starts writing. However, when you think it will finish writing the entire thing, you find out that it has stopped generating the response in the middle and shows you a button to continue generation! Imagine you take a break for 5 minutes after giving the prompt to write an article. When you come back, you may find only 1/3rd has been written, and it stopped!  

How Should Users Approach the Limitations of ChatGPT? 

Finding your way through the limitations of ChatGPT may seem daunting, but hang in there! ChatGPT’s nature is to produce content; that’s why updated information is not what you will get. Following are the ways you can overcome ChatGPT limits:

1. Verify generated facts and statistics for accuracy. 
2. Check grammar, readability, and sentence structures. 
3. Link back to credible sources to validate the data points.
4. Use expert opinions or recent news and add fresh perspectives. 
5. Adopt a tone that aligns with your targeted audience.

What are the Risks of ChatGPT?

While there are many benefits and limitations of ChatGPT, you cannot overlook the risks. Once you know what the risks are, you will know how to make the best out of the tool. Below are a few ChatGPT risks one should be acquainted with:

1. Increased Cybercrime: Cybercriminals often use ChatGPT to develop ideations for malicious tools.
2. Lack of Confidentiality: One of the major ChatGPT risks is that many employees tend to expose company confidential information to the AI. In return, ChatGPT learns that information and may spill the beans to someone who demands to know it.
3. Potential Misguidance: ChatGPT possesses the skill of teaching. Users may take advantage of this skill and learn the wrong practices. Today, we know ChatGPT has undergone several updates and levelled up to 4 versions to be more efficient in delivering the output.

How to Ensure ChatGPT Provides Correct Answers?

We now know the many ChatGPT limitations. However, you can still generate accurate answers to your queries. Here are a few tips that will help you ensure you get correct answers from ChatGPT.

1. Provide proper prompts: Try to give detailed prompts. You can start by providing information about the target audience, word count, and type of content (whether it’s a blog, email, or essay). Also, mention the tone you want by providing an example.
2. Review: Thoroughly review the responses generated by ChatGPT. Look for facts and any statistics provided by cross-checking its accuracy.
3. Question phrasing: Ensure to frame clear and concise questions to generate relevant answers.

Now that you know about the ChatGPT limitations and how to overcome them, we hope you make the best use of this cool tool. You can directly provide feedback to ChatGPT and report the challenges you face. There are, of course, a few must-try ChatGPT alternatives you can give a try. Also, did you know that Bard is considered the biggest rival of ChatGPT? Many are dubbing this rivalry as ChatGPT vs. BARD, so figure out which one suits your purposes best. In the end, it’s safe to say that there is still time for AI to take over the world, and we can keep using AI in our favour only!