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I don’t want more conversational, I want more to the point. Less telling me how great my question is, less about being friendly, instead I want more cold, hard, accurate, direct, and factual results. It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure I follow. My point is that pretty much everybody who doesn't have a degree in CS or IT assumes due to BigAI corporations that LLMs or GenAI tools think. This is reflected by the words they use. Such people do not say "the model parse my query and process it via it neural network based architecture to give a statistically plausible answer given the context" but rather they say "I had a chat with Claude an…
two questions: 1. do you ever point out that you can't actually mine bitcoin with a pickaxe? 2. what made you think that the parent comment somehow implied that it "actually thinks"?
1. I did actually mine Bitcoins back in the days (back when it was still a cryptoanarchist dream not coopted by the finance industry, scammers and destroying the planet... so a while ago) so I had to explain that too unfortunately. It does highlight a trend that, again, non technical expert take marketing terms at face value.
2. they said "maybe just don't include nonsense in the answer?" which does imply that they believe hallucinations are a side effect that can be solved.
I don’t want more conversational, I want more to the point. Less telling me how great my question is, less about being friendly, instead I want more cold, hard, accurate, direct, and factual results. It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.
A group of people seem to have forged weird relationships with AI and that is what they want. It's extremely worrying. Heck, the ex Prime Minister of the UK said he loved ChatGPT recently because it tells him how great he is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've read from several supposed AI prompt-masters that this actually reduces output quality. I can't speak to the validity of these claims though.
Forcing shorter answers will definitely reduce their quality. Every token an LLM generates is like a little bit of extra thinking time. Sometimes it needs to work up to an answer. If you end a response too quickly, such as by demanding one-word answers, it's much more likely to produce hallucinations.
First they moved away from this in 4o because it led to more sycophancy, AI psychosis and ultimately deaths by suicide[1].
Then growth slowed[2], and so now they rush this out the door even though it's likely not 'healthy' for users.
Just like social media these platforms have a growth dial which is directly linked to a mental health dial because addiction is good for business. Yes, people should take personal responsibility for this kind of thing, but in cases where these tools become addicting, and they are not well understood this seems to be a tragedy of the commons.
1 - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/07/chatgpt-l...
2 – https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-peaked-...
All the examples of "warmer" generations show that OpenAI's definition of warmer is synonymous with sycophantic , which is a surprise given all the criticism against that particular aspect of ChatGPT. I suspect this approach is a direct response to the backlash against removing 4o.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of curiosity, is this a question you think Google is well-suited to answer^? How many Wikipedia pages will you need to open to determine the answer? When folks are frustrated because they see a bizarre question that is an extreme outlier being touted as "model still can't do _" part of it is because you've set the goalposts so far beyond what traditional Google search or Wikipedia are useful for. ^ I spent about…
Unlike the friendly bot, if I can’t find credible enough sources I’ll stay with an honest “I don’t know”, instead of praising the genius of whoever asked and then making something up.
And then you can use that to quickly look - does that player have championships mentioned on their wiki?
It's important to flag that there are some categories that are easy (facts that haven't changed for ten years on Wikipedia) for llms, but inference only llms (no tools) are extremely limited and you should always treat them as a person saying "I seem to recall x"
Is the ux/marketing deeply flawed? Yes of course, I also wish an inference-only response appropriately stated its uncertainty (like a human would - eg without googling my guess is x). But among technical folks it feels disingenuous to say "models still can't answer this obscure question" as a reason why they're stupid or useless.
I don’t want more conversational, I want more to the point. Less telling me how great my question is, less about being friendly, instead I want more cold, hard, accurate, direct, and factual results. It’s a machine and a tool, not a person and definitely not my friend.
> Earlier this year, we added preset options to tailor the tone of how ChatGPT responds. Today, we’re refining those options to better reflect the most common ways people use ChatGPT. Default, Friendly (formerly Listener), and Efficient (formerly Robot) remain (with updates), and we’re adding Professional, Candid, and Quirky. [...] The original Cynical (formerly Cynic) and Nerdy (formerly Nerd) options we introduced earlier this year will remain available unchanged under the same dropdown in personalization settings.
as well as:
> Additionally, the updated GPT‑5.1 models are also better at adhering to custom instructions, giving you even more precise control over tone and behavior.
So perhaps it'd be worth giving that a shot?