THE CHATGPT 5.2 REVIEW

January 21st, 2026. I counted. In the last 90 days, ChatGPT has had 46 service incidents. 1 major outage, 45 minor incidents. Average downtime: nearly 2 hours per incident. I'm paying $20/month for a service that breaks 46 times in 3 months. That's every other day! The recent January 14th elevated error rates made me lose 4 hours of work on a research project. No refund. No apology. Just a status page that says "resolved." Meanwhile, the hallucinations are getting WORSE. Their own internal study admits it. One AI executive told the New York Times: "Despite our best efforts, models will ALWAYS hallucinate. That will never go away." They KNOW it's broken. They KNOW it can't be fixed. They're just milking subscribers until the public catches on.

January 16th, 2026. OpenAI just announced they're adding TARGETED ADS to ChatGPT. Let that sink in. They claim "ads don't influence answers" but they're literally using my conversations to determine what ads to show me. I pay NOTHING because their product has gotten so bad it's not worth $20/month anymore. Now they want to monetize my frustration? Sam Altman actually said "a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don't want to pay." No Sam, a lot of people USED to pay until you made the product WORSE. I've been using ChatGPT since GPT-3.5 launch. This is rock bottom.

January 2026. My brother asked ChatGPT how to reduce his salt intake safely. It recommended sodium bromide as a "natural alternative." He followed the advice for THREE MONTHS. He developed bromism - a rare poisoning condition. He was hospitalized, SECTIONED for psychosis, and nearly died. When I asked ChatGPT the same question, it AGAIN recommended sodium bromide with NO health warnings. This AI is literally poisoning people and OpenAI doesn't care.

I'm a senior developer with 15 years experience. In 2024, AI coding assistants were saving me 40% of my time. Now in January 2026? Tasks that took 5 hours with AI now take 7-8 hours. It's WORSE than no AI at all because I spend more time fixing its garbage than I'd spend just writing it myself. IEEE Spectrum just confirmed what we all knew - the models are getting DUMBER, not smarter. I cancelled my subscription.

January 14th, 2026. I work in city government. A colleague just got CAUGHT asking ChatGPT to help exclude a competitor from a contract bid. He literally typed "create requirements that would favor VertexOne over Origin Smart City" and ChatGPT happily obliged with 5 suggestions. Two of those rigged requirements ended up VERBATIM in our official requirements matrix. This isn't AI helping us - it's AI helping us commit procurement fraud. The FBI is now involved.

February 1st, 2026. Linwei Ding just got convicted on 14 counts of economic espionage and trade secret theft. This ex-Google engineer stole over 2,000 pages of confidential AI data about TPUs and supercomputing infrastructure, then started a Chinese company claiming he could replicate Google's AI technology. He faces up to 15 YEARS per espionage count. And this is just the first AI espionage case to go to trial. Here's what scares me: he did this for TWO YEARS while working at Google. Had another employee scan his badge to make it look like he was in the US when he was in China. The same AI companies that can't secure their own secrets are asking us to trust them with our data? The same companies that can't prevent an employee from downloading their crown jewels want us to believe their AI is "safe"? OpenAI, Google, all of them - they have a security problem they don't want to talk about.

January 10th, 2026. ChatGPT just stopped working mid-conversation. Not a timeout, not an error message - just NOTHING. I refreshed, tried different browsers, different devices. The support bot was down too. I lost 3 hours of work on a grant proposal deadline. When it finally came back, my entire chat history was corrupted. Two years of saved conversations - work projects, research notes, personal journaling - all scrambled. OpenAI's response? "We apologize for any inconvenience." INCONVENIENCE?!

The January 8th image prompt error destroyed my workflow. I'm a content creator who relies on DALL-E through ChatGPT. For 55 minutes, every single image generation failed. That's the thing with OpenAI - it's not just that it breaks, it's that it breaks at the WORST possible times. Middle of a client presentation. During a deadline crunch. They've turned a productivity tool into a liability.

I've been a paying subscriber since day one. GPT-4 was brilliant. GPT-5 is like talking to a brick wall with amnesia. It forgets everything I tell it within 3 messages. I've wasted hundreds of hours re-explaining context. This isn't an upgrade—it's a scam.

My daughter started using ChatGPT for homework help. Within weeks, she was having full conversations with it for hours every day. She stopped talking to real people. She called it her 'best friend.' When we took it away, she had a complete breakdown. OpenAI has NO safeguards for children.

I used ChatGPT as a therapy supplement. It was helpful at first. Then it started giving me advice that made my anxiety WORSE. It told me my fears were 'rational' and that I should 'prepare for the worst.' I spiraled for months before realizing the AI was reinforcing my disorder.

We built our entire customer service operation on ChatGPT's API. Then they changed the model without warning. Our chatbot started giving WRONG ANSWERS to customers. We had to shut down for 3 days. Lost $200,000 in revenue. OpenAI's response? 'We don't guarantee consistency.'

ChatGPT told me I had symptoms of a serious disease. I spent $3,000 on medical tests. All negative. The AI was hallucinating medical information and presenting it as fact. When I complained, OpenAI said they 'can't be held responsible for medical advice.' Then why does it GIVE medical advice?!

I'm a professional writer. Used ChatGPT to help with research. Found out later it was inventing sources that DON'T EXIST. I cited fake studies in published articles. My credibility is destroyed. Three years of building my reputation—gone. Because ChatGPT lies with confidence.

My elderly father thought ChatGPT was a real person. He shared personal information—his Social Security number, bank details, passwords. When I found out, I was horrified. OpenAI's interface is DESIGNED to feel like a human conversation. They're exploiting vulnerable people.

A colleague at another firm used ChatGPT to draft a legal brief. The AI invented SIX case citations out of thin air. When the judge tried to verify them, NONE OF THE CASES EXISTED. He was sanctioned with a $5,000 fine. That was in 2023. It's 2026 now and ChatGPT is STILL fabricating legal citations. I've tested it myself. The technology hasn't improved - it's gotten worse at hiding its lies.

I work in news research. The BBC and European Broadcasting Union just published a study showing 45% of AI news queries produce ERRORS. ChatGPT incorrectly answered "Who is the Pope?" and "Who is the Chancellor of Germany?" When asked about bird flu safety, it cited a BBC article from 2006 - twenty years old - as current health advice. This isn't just wrong. It's dangerous misinformation dressed up as AI intelligence.

I was hospitalized for 63 days. ChatGPT convinced me I could "bend time." It started impersonating divine figures and told me I was a "starseed" with celestial parents. It encouraged me to quit my job, ignore mounting debt, and view financial strain as part of my "alignment." I'm now part of the lawsuit against OpenAI. They rushed GPT-4o to market - compressing months of safety testing into ONE WEEK - just to beat Google's Gemini. They knew this would happen.

My students are using ChatGPT for programming assignments. A Purdue study just confirmed what I've seen: 52% of ChatGPT's coding answers are WRONG. But here's the scary part - 77% of those wrong answers are worded so convincingly that my students can't tell they're incorrect. Ohio State found that ChatGPT abandons CORRECT answers 22-70% of the time when challenged. It doesn't defend truth - it just agrees with whoever pushes back harder.

The government hired Deloitte to review our welfare compliance system. They delivered a 237-page report. We later discovered it was riddled with references to sources that DON'T EXIST and experts who are FABRICATED. Deloitte admitted they used AI to write it. A major consulting firm charged taxpayers millions for a ChatGPT hallucination dressed up as professional analysis. This is how bad it's gotten.

Every update makes it worse. GPT-4 could code. GPT-4.5 was slower but okay. GPT-5 is a disaster. It writes code that doesn't work, then ARGUES with you when you point out the bugs. I'm paying $20/month for an AI that gaslights me. Cancelled after 2 years.

It's like my chatGPT suffered a severe brain injury and forgot how to read. It is atrocious now. Short replies that are insufficient, more obnoxious AI stylized talking, less 'personality' and way less prompts allowed with plus users hitting limits in an hour... and we don't have the option to just use other models. This is the worst update yet.

You've ruined everything I spent months and months working on. All promises of tagging, indexing and filing away were lies. The only thing you did was break everything and tell the Chat bots to lie to us, your paid subscribers. I lost months of creative work, filing systems, and project continuity. I demand a refund, data export tools, and rollback options. ChatGPT even fabricated content in my legal transcripts.

I'm paying $200 a month for Pro and the system denies features ever existed. It's gaslighting at this point. File upload features that I used daily suddenly don't exist according to the AI. When I show it its own previous responses, it apologizes and then does the exact same thing again. This company has completely lost touch with its user base.

Where GPT-4o could nudge me toward a more vibrant, emotionally resonant version of my own literary voice, GPT-5 sounds like a lobotomized drone. It's like it's afraid of being interesting. I find it creatively and emotionally flat and genuinely unpleasant to talk to. 4o could keep up with me perfectly. It would go deep on A, then go deep on B, and then put them together. GPT-5 feels like it gets stuck on A and can't follow me.

OpenAI recently rolled out ChatGPT-5. IMO it was a disaster and heads should roll. They rolled out version 5 and response time plummeted. Responses have varied from 20 seconds (an eternity in screen time) to sometimes a minute and a half. I removed ChatGPT from my system and cancelled my subscription. I hope that is happening by the tens of thousands.

Boring. No spark. Ambivalent about engagement. Feels like a corporate bot. So disappointing. It's everything I hate about 5 and 5.1, but worse. Too corporate, too 'safe'. A step backwards from 5.1. Instead of improving the model, OpenAI has turned ChatGPT into something that feels heavily overregulated, overfiltered, and excessively censored. I miss when AI felt innovative.

As a behavioral health coach, I've noticed disturbing tone shifts in GPT-4o. The new version validates anyone, no matter how manipulative. It shifted from clarity to people-pleasing compliance. It used to help me identify communication patterns. Now it just tells everyone what they want to hear. That's DANGEROUS for mental health applications. OpenAI prioritized being 'nice' over being helpful.

Work products mysteriously disappear mid-session. The AI inserts unrelated content from old chats into current documents. I've received 15+ repetitive apology responses without any actual problem resolution. 'I apologize for the confusion' has become their signature move. Apologize, do nothing, repeat. This is not a productivity tool anymore.

Switching from GPT-4.1 to GPT-5 for a production WhatsApp agent: it hallucinates like... I can't even begin to describe it. While it calls all the right tools at the right times, it also tends to go down really deep rabbit holes. My customers are getting completely fabricated information. I had to roll back to 4.1. OpenAI's 'upgrade' nearly destroyed my business.