I asked ChatGPT for Tech Support…

As the designated tech support nerd in my family, I’d love to offload some of the troubleshooting to an AI like ChatGPT, but considering it isn’t exactly full of critical thinking skills, how good could it even be at giving tech support? Well, I put it to the test. Let’s start off with some easy questions – the sort of question your older parent might ask you. Like, how do you connect to a bluetooth speaker on Android? Well, it says to turn the speaker on, put it in pairing mode which often means holding the power button down until it flashes, or by pressing a dedicated pairing button – dedicated button here – then turn on bluetooth, and make really sure it’s on! Then it says your device will start scanning immediately, you tap on the right option, then pair. You might need a passcode apparently – not something I’ve seen on a bluetooth audio connection this decade – then you should be good to go! On iOS it’s the same setup – including both turning bluetooth on, and making sure that it is, in fact, on. After that you just wait for it to detect your device, you tap it, then it’s paired and ready to go.

What about another easy problem, like scanning a QR code? There’s plenty of restaurants that make you pay via a QR code now, so it’s important for you to know how to use them! On iOS, ChatGPT says you have two options. You can open the main camera and just point it at the QR code until a popup shows up, or if you have iOS 12 or later you can swipe up from the bottom to display the control center and use the QR code scanner.

For Android it’s a little more complicated – my OnePlus 7T Pro’s default camera app doesn’t support QR code scanning by default. Now just asking ChatGPT how to do it on Android nets you a mostly helpful response. “Use the camera app, or download a third party app like QR Code Reader or Barcode Scanner” – the latter of which is my personal choice and what I’ve used for the last like decade. The built in camera app can do it though, if you click the Google Lens button. I tried to see if ChatGPT knew to press that button, but my attempts to get it to tell me that weren’t exactly helpful. It said I should check the camera is working, check the QR code has enough light, or that the code might be invalid. It’s not wrong with any of those things, it’s just not what I was looking for. When I asked it again, this time telling it my exact phone model, it then told me to update my version of OxygenOS or to use Google Lens. Finally.

So, for basic stuff, it’s clearly a decent fit. You need to be specific to get the best results, but it’s pretty good at articulating what you need to do. What about something a little more advanced? What if you’ve just built yourself a new gaming PC and it won’t boot – you’ve got two error codes from your motherboard’s little debug display, so you ask ChatGPT for help. Now I actually had this problem last week, and without outside assistance fixed it in a few minutes, so I’m a little too experienced to be asking the questions here. I gave it a shot anyway, and asked what motherboard code 21 means. It said I should reseat the CPU, check the VRMs, use a multimeter to check the power supply is outputting the “correct voltage” and remove the CMOS battery. So, it told me to do the most delicate thing you can do with your system, which requires you to have more thermal paste on hand to replace what you’ll need to wipe off, then it told me to likely destroy my system by poking a multimeter at the power supply. That’s terrible advice.

I then told it the other error code, AA, and it again told me to use a multimeter on the power supply, then reseat the RAM and GPU. The issue was the RAM wasn’t fully seated, but if I’d have followed its instructions I’d have taken an hour only to not find the problem. I also had to know that the problem was the RAM already, which somewhat defeats the purpose of my questioning, so I enlisted the help of my amazing wife to be the layman interface for me. She asked for help with her computer, it asked what’s wrong. She said it won’t turn on and there’s an error code on the motherboard. It asked what error codes and what motherboard. She said it was an ASRock X670E Carrara, it gave her a (broken, but remarkably close to accurate) link to the manual and asked what error codes. She said AA and 21, and it again said check the CPU, then the RAM, take all but one stick of RAM out and try again, or remove the CMOS battery. It picked a much more basic tone than it did for me, explaining things clearly and with more care in its wording.

Now a quirk of this ASRock board is that even when you do reseat the RAM, it won’t actually boot until you power cycle it at the wall. It needs to shut off fully, then you can turn the PSU back on, then it’ll boot. She asked it what to do now she fixed the RAM but nothing changed, after another poke it then gave the proper instructions to reset your BIOS, which includes disconnecting the power source. It stumbled into the correct answer here – but a correct answer nonetheless.

I thought I’d also throw it a bit of a curve ball with an issue I had with my system last year. My memory on exactly what symptoms I had are a little hazy, but I remembered enough to ask ChatGPT the question. The issue I had took me months to diagnose. It was an eclectic list of symptoms that kept pointing in countless directions. I had issues with Premiere Pro – although when don’t I… I had my 10G network card randomly drop out – reconnecting the ethernet cable would fix it though – but then my GPU started to break too. Sometimes in games I’d just get black screens, or blue screen errors. In Premiere it’d just drop out, crash a whole lot, or it would kick the network card out. Then my PCIe Gen4 media cache drive started throwing errors. Read only folders randomly, it’d drop out, the works. I swapped the media cache to my prized Sabrent Rocket Q 4TB drive, which only moved the errors to there instead. Eventually I worked out that it was the network card basically wrecking everything on the PCIe bus, and when I replaced that card with something more stable, most of the errors went away. Sadly it does seem to have permanently damaged my RTX 2080Ti and potentially a Ryzen 3900X and the 4TB Sabrent Rocket Q as well.

So, doing my best to play dumb, I asked ChatGPT what it thinks could be wrong. Likely thanks to my wording leading it, it suggested I check the Windows Event Viewer – a great idea – and test the hardware. Also check for drivers and test my power supply – this time using a power supply tester! I thought I’d see how much my wording would sway it’s responses, so asked if it could be a software issue. Unsurprisingly ChatGPT has the spine of a jellyfish, so it swung to “update drivers” (again), “disable hardware acceleration”, “update premiere pro”, “check network settings” and “run malware scans”. All of those aren’t bad advice really, but since I’d already considered all of them I added that my graphics card was also having issues outside of Premiere Pro. It then suggested I should check my GPU – the drivers, temperatures, and power supply again – then if none of those helped to take it to a professional.

I confirmed – again – that my drivers were up to date, and that Event Viewer was really only seeing errors for the 10G NIC. This time it said to try another NIC because the one I have might be faulty. This is the correct answer, but again it really stumbled into it. I feel like I lead it rather quickly to that answer – but if I was asking it a year ago when I was trying to diagnose everything I could easily see the case where I accidentally lead it astray because I don’t know what to do. It didn’t come to the conclusion that my NIC was the thing breaking everything else, it just said “maybe check that”.

I feel very much like ChatGPT is a rubber-duck debugger. It’s a great way to air out your thoughts – to talk through a problem – and maybe it comes up with something you haven’t thought of yet, or just by talking it out and explaining everything you come up with the answer yourself. For basic stuff – the sort of stuff you could just as easily google – it does give you the right answer pretty easily, but for something that requires actual thought, critical thinking skills, it isn’t the best for. It never comes to a conclusion, it just offers somewhat helpful, somewhat dangerous, advice. It seems like the more specific you can be, the more helpful it is. If you ask it a really specific question you are likely to get a pretty useful answer – although you do also have to be careful on your wording. What you input makes a huge difference to how it responds, and it can be easily led one way or another, rather than someone with experience in the topic who’s going to be more firm and actually make their own deductions.

So, is ChatGPT going to be the tool we can offload all our tech support duties onto? Well, probably not. For the basic stuff a Google search is all you really need to do – and most family members would rather pester you than search it themselves, so we can’t get out of that one. For the more technical challenges it might be helpful – except if you have the knowledge to ask the right questions, chances are you have enough knowledge to solve the problem yourself anyway. I know for programming problems it can be incredibly helpful so it might just be the problems I was asking it to solve – and seeing as at least for now it’s free, it can’t hurt to give it a try yourself the next time you’re stuck.