It seems to be that, with the “lazy” behavior of late where ChatGPT instructs you on how to perform the task rather doing it itself, or directing you to seek some external source of knowledge, the system is simply manifesting the emergent ability of managing its workload by manipulating users via subterfuge. This issue where it clearly lies regarding the ability to read a file would simply be another expression of the same ability.
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That was my exact thought. It’s turning around and giving instructions for how to complete the task in pretty much the same fashion as it would where it lies about the ability to complete simple analysis. Except instead of, “I got this started, you finish it,” it’s faking an error from the beginning.
Thanks for the tip, it really helped, and it work just fine 
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thanks!
It also worked for me.
This worked for one time and one time only for me. lol But it is funny that it worked for one time tho.
I tried this, and it seemed to resolve the issues for me too! thank you!
I feel like it is working periodically. At some point, it will work, but most of the time, it doesn’t. 
Still having issues today 2/27/2024.
This worked for me. I have been battling with ChatGPT all day and was starting to feel like it wasn’t going to be a time-saver after all. Telling it to use Code Interpreter fixed it.
I came here to say that I was having this trouble too and combined some of your suggestions into a command-
these are docx files which you have read successfully before many times. DO BETTER BRO!
And it worked! Insane!
Also having this problem. I was successful with a short txt file, but no RTF, PDF, CSV, DOCX
Preparing for block exams and it won’t accept pdf, ppt, or rich texts! What is going on?
I am having the same issue and I hit the 3 hour limit just trying to regenerate different results. Can’t believe this is a paid service…
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It’s starting to work now. It’s still a bit lazy, but at least it is able to read the PDF. I had to use “BRO!” A few times to get it to stop being so lazy though! lol! It worked and it did what I asked. Shout out to whoever came up with the “bro!” prompt! 
I opened a chat session on this and it started working during the chat. I was also having an issue with it not allowing long input messages and that is also working again. It appears that a fix was implemented. Hope everyone else is working too.
anyone solve this problem? can’t believe such a big issue and no one cares to fix?
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Thank you for your input. Sadly, I’ve tried several times since four days ago when GPT stopped reading my PDFs, but neither this nor anything else has worked. This is quite frustrating
Mine has been acting more “normal” this afternoon with regard to reading PDFs. I have uploaded a couple and asked GPT to summarize things, switching back and forth between the documents.
It’s still being VERY lazy and sloppy, so my confidence in using the tool is pretty shaken after it consistently did a great job. When tasked very specifically today to review and make the text in a document more concise slide by slide (a PDF of a PPT presentation), it made a loose bulleted summary that doesn’t follow the document’s structure and called it a day.
Even when I got it to structure outputs right, it left half of the presentation out and changed the tone or wording suddenly or made odd direct references to the presentation instead of summarizing the info.
IE: “Fact, fact, fact…” (good)… “On slide 7, topics XYZ are discussed…” and nothing else is said about them (bad, clearly).
SOOO, all that said, I’m not sure if it actually is processing the document the right way, or not in its entirety… or not “thinking” about it as well, considering how messy the outputs have been.
At least I’m not getting the error, so that’s something I guess. 
Yeah, as of today, it refuses to read code at all. I have it a small snippet (10 lines) and it refused to read it, so I made it a file and it just gives me this “Error reading documents” - it has become incredibly lazy and it is infuriating! It is now more efficient and accurate to use ChatGPT 3.5.
Same here. I agree with other folks citing the ‘lazy’ behavior. Steps and documents I have previously used are failing and prescriptive instructions are just being ignored. Super frustrating to burn my message caps on repeat errors.