"Warmer and more conversational" - they're basically admitting GPT-5 was too robotic. The real tell here is splitting into Instant vs Thinking models explicitly. They've given up on the unified model dream and are now routing queries like everyone else (Anthropic's been doing this, Google's Gemini too). Calling it "GPT-5.1 Thinking" instead of o3-mini or whatever is interesting branding. They're trying to make reason…
GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
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Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#412I wish chatgpt would stop saying things like "here's a no nonsense answer" like maybe just don't include nonsense in the answer?
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#413it feels incredibly dumb now, getting some really basic questions wrong and just throwing nuance to the wind. for claiming to be more human, it understands far less. for example: if I start at a negative net worth how long until I am a millionaire if I consistently grow 2.5% each month? Anyone here would have a basic understand the premise and be able to start answering, 5.1 says it's impossible, with hand holding it…
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what the personality selector is for: you can just pick 'Efficient' (formerly Robot) and it does a good job of answering tersely? https://share.cleanshot.com/9kBDGs7Q
Unfortunately, I also don't want other people to interact with a sycophantic robot friend, yet my picker only applies to my conversation
Giving people what makes them feel good in the short term is not actually necessarily a good thing. See also: cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, etc.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is like arguing that we shouldn't try to regulate drugs because some people might "want" the heroin that ruins their lives. The existing "personalities" of LLMs are dangerous, full stop. They are trained to generate text with an air of authority and to tend to agree with anything you tell them. It is irresponsible to allow this to continue while not at least deliberately improving education around their use. Thi…
Disincentivizing something undesirable will not necessarily lead to better results, because it wrongly assumes that you can foresee all consequences of an action or inaction. Someone who now falls in love with an LLM might instead fall for some seductress who hurts him more. Someone who now receives bad mental health assistance might receive none whatsoever.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#416> Artificial intelligence (AI) developers are increasingly building language models with warm and empathetic personas that millions of people now use for advice, therapy, and companionship. Here, we show how this creates a significant trade-off: optimizing language models for warmth undermines their reliability, especially when users express vulnerability. We conducted controlled experiments on five language models of varying sizes and architectures, training them to produce warmer, more empathetic responses, then evaluating them on safety-critical tasks. Warm models showed substantially higher error rates (+10 to +30 percentage points) than their original counterparts, promoting conspiracy theories, providing incorrect factual information, and offering problematic medical advice. They were also significantly more likely to validate incorrect user beliefs, particularly when user messages expressed sadness. Importantly, these effects were consistent across different model architectures, and occurred despite preserved performance on standard benchmarks, revealing systematic risks that current evaluation practices may fail to detect. As human-like AI systems are deployed at an unprecedented scale, our findings indicate a need to rethink how we develop and oversee these systems that are reshaping human relationships and social interaction.
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#417A lot of negativity towards this and OpenAI in general. While skepticism is always good I wonder if this has crossed the line from reasoned into socially reinforced dogpiling. My own experience with GPT 5 thinking and its predecessor o3, both of which I used a lot, is that they were super difficult to work with on technical tasks outside of software. They often wrote extremely dense, jargon filled responses that ofte…
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#418Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#419I've switched over to https://thaura.ai , which is working on being a more ethical AI. A side effect I hadn't realized is missing the drama over the latest OpenAI changes.
What a bizarre product. Weirdly political message and ethnic branding. I suppose "ethical AI" means models tuned to their biases instead of "Big Tech AI" biases. Or probably just a proxy to an existing API with a custom system prompt. The least they could've done is check their generated slop images for typos ("STOP GENCCIDE" on the Plans page). The whole thing reeks of the usual "AI" scam site. At best, it's profiti…
Re: GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
#420Holy em-dash fest in the examples, would have thought they'd augment the training dataset to reduce this behavior.
I'm glad em dashes exist, they help me spot AI spam.