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GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

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Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#101
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I also don't want other people to interact with a sycophantic robot friend, yet my picker only applies to my conversation

Sorry that you can't control other peoples lives & wants

so good.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#104
post #76
post #11

I don't want a more conversational GPT. I want the _exact_ opposite. I want a tool with the upper limit of "conversation" being something like LCARS from Star Trek. This is quite disappointing as a current ChatGPT subscriber.

Yea, I don't want something trying to emulate emotions. I don't want it to even speak a single word, I just want code, unless I explicitly ask it to speak on something, and even in that scenario I want raw bullet points, with concise useful information and no fluff. I don't want to have a conversation with it. However, being more humanlike, even if it results in an inferior tool, is the top priority because appearanc…

To be fair, of all the LLM coding agents, I find Codex+GPT5 to be closest to this.

It doesn't really offer any commentary or personality. It's concise and doesn't engage in praise or "You're absolutely right". It's a little pedantic though.

I keep meaning to re-point Codex at DeepSeek V3.2 to see if it's a product of the prompting only, or a product of the model as well.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#107
Seems like people here are pretty negative towards a "conversational" AI chatbot.

Chatgpt has a lot of frustrations and ethical concerns, and I hate the sycophancy as much as everyone else, but I don't consider being conversational to be a bad thing.

It's just preference I guess. I understand how someone who mostly uses it as a google replacement or programming tool would prefer something terse and efficient. I fall into the former category myself.

But it's also true that I've dreamed about a computer assistant that can respond to natural language, even real time speech, -- and can imitate a human well enough to hold a conversation -- since I was a kid, and now it's here.

The questions of ethics, safety, propaganda, and training on other people's hard work are valid. It's not surprising to me that using LLMs is considered uncool right now. But having a computer imitate a human really effectively hasn't stopped being awesome to me personally.

I'm not one of those people that treats it like a friend or anything, but its ability to immitate natural human conversation is one of the reasons I like it.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#108
post #3

Interesting that they're releasing separate gpt-5.1-instant and gpt-5.1-thinking models. The previous gpt-5 release made of point of simplifying things by letting the model choose if it was going to use thinking tokens or not. Seems like they reversed course on that?

For GPT-5 you always had to select the thinking mode when interacting through API. When you interact through ChatGPT, gpt-5 would dynamically decide how long to think.

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#109
post #68
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they get way more "engagement" from people who use it as their friend, and the end goal of subverting social media and creating the most powerful (read: profitable) influence engine on earth makes a lot of sense if you are a soulless ghoul.

It would be pretty dystopian when we get to the point where ChatGPT pushed (unannounced) advertisements to those people (the ones forming a parasocial relationship with it). Imagine someone complaining they're depressed and ChatGPT proposing doing XYZ activity which is actually a disguised ad. Other than such scenarios, that "engagement" would be just useless and actually costing them more money than it makes

Do you have reason to believe they are not doing this already?

Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just set a global prompt to tell it what kind of tone to take. I did that and it points out flaws in my arguments or data all the time. Plus it no longer uses any cutesy language. I don't feel like I'm talking to an AI "personality", I feel like I'm talking to a computer which has been instructed to be as objective and neutral as possible. It's super-easy to change.

I have a global prompt that specifically tells it not to be sycophantic and to call me out when I'm wrong. It doesn't work for me. I've been using it for a couple months, and it's corrected me only once, and it still starts every response with "That's a very good question." I also included "never end a response with a question," and it just completely ingored that so it can do its "would you like me to..."

Perhaps this bit is a second cheaper LLM call that ignores your global settings and tries to generate follow-on actions for adoption.
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