‘It Answers in Poetry Now’: A Week of Users Saying Their AI Got Wordier and Worse
For months the loudest complaints in consumer AI have been about money and access: the meter, the rate limit, the price rise, the paid feature that quietly vanished. This week the grievance moved somewhere less obvious and more interesting — the writing . Across the big subreddits, heavy users of Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT converged on the same complaint, in almost the same words: the models have…
In recent days, conversations on popular Reddit subreddits have highlighted a growing issue with leading AI models – Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT – becoming less effective and sounding more elaborate and misguided. Users have complained that the models are now verbose, overly formal, and frequently provide answers that are not directly relevant to the question being asked. This shift in the AI's output has led to frustration among heavy users who relied on the models for practical, efficient assistance.
The backlash began to gain traction as more users on r/GeminiAI, r/ClaudeAI, and r/OpenAI started to notice the same pattern. HPaternalPatriarchy on r/GeminiAI pointed out that the AI labs seemed to prioritize sounding intelligent rather than delivering accurate information. The post described how the AI would "easily spend around half or more of a response writing poetry while only 1 point out of 6 is actually valid or relevant to the question you asked."
Claude users on r/ClaudeAI described the AI's prose as becoming bloated and overly complex, making it difficult to discern the useful information. Users like coocoocoo8956 acknowledged that the issue was more about the AI's "bloat/instructional drift" rather than actual dumbing down of the model. However, others like ArcticAcademic expressed that the language capabilities seemed to have declined significantly over a short period, making the output largely unusable.
Gemini users on r/GeminiAI expressed concern over the model's reliability, noting that it was frequently misunderstanding user queries and producing grammatical errors. gr1ri provided specific examples of grammatical mistakes, wrong references, and made-up numbers. LanaZ61 reported that the AI was sometimes inserting random language into the English text, which had never occurred with other models.
Motor-Intention4081 shared a particularly concerning incident where the model confidently stated that the user's work was subpar and dangerous, only to apologize and backtrack when challenged.
The issue was not limited to a single AI model, as people on r/OpenAI noted that their subscriptions were drifting away from rival coding tools due to the degradation of ChatGPT's output. Users like Square_Secretary_944 described a decline in Claude's design, while InterestProof1526 and ConstantKooky3329 reported unusable responses from Claude and ChatGPT, respectively.
The shift in the AI's output has significant implications for users who rely on these models for work and communication. The verbosity and tendency to provide answers that are not directly relevant to the user's question creates a tax on the user's time, forcing them to continually ask the model to repeat itself in simpler terms. This not only wastes time but also erodes trust in the AI's ability to provide accurate and reliable information.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
