ChatGPT outage reminds users what life was like before AI

There was a time not too long ago where last-minute essays were written overnight by adrenaline-filled students, work emails were carefully crafted using corporate lingo passed down by generations, and time-consuming busywork was a rite of passage for entry-level employees. Now that AI has made its way into daily life, those days seem to be farther away than ever. That is, unless ChatGPT is down. In a recent OpenAI outage, ChatGPT Work—an agentic mode of the LLM that lets you delegate tasks—was down for several hours, leaving users unable to initiate or continue tasks on the platform. Many on social media initially reacted to the outage through comedy, jokingly saying that even a chatbot does not want to work on a Monday—the day the outage ocurred. “The AI is like nah need a day off,” one user joked, with another adding, “Calling in sick on a Monday is AGI.” A user also responded to fears of AI-related job losses, joking “i was worried AI would replace me but apparently we have the same work ethic.” How sweet it was But when OpenAI took to social media to update users on the outage and later report that the issue had been fixed, the response was not entirely one of excitement. “An…