GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

The target users for this behavior are the ones using GPT as a replacement for social interactions; these are the people who crashed out/broke down about the GPT5 changes as though their long-term romantic partner had dumped them out of nowhere and ghosted them.

I get that those people were distraught/emotionally devastated/upset about the change, but I think that fact is reason enough not to revert that behavior. AI is not a person, and making it "warmer" and "more conversational" just reinforces those unhealthy behaviors. ChatGPT should be focused on being direct and succinct, and not on this sort of "I understand that must be very frustrating for you, let me see what I can do to resolve this" call center support agent speak.

True, neither here, but i think what we're seeing is a transition in focus. People at oai have finally clued in on the idea that agi via transformers is a pipedream like elons self driving cars, and so oai is pivoting toward friend/digital partner bot. Charlatan in cheif sam altman recently did say they're going to open up the product to adult content generation, which they wouldnt do if they still beleived some serious amd useful tool (in the specified usecases) were possible. Right now an LLM has three main uses. Interactive rubber ducky, entertainment, and mass surveillance. Since I've been following this saga, since gpt2 days, my close bench set of various tasks etc. Has been seeing a drop in metrics not a rise, so while open bench resultd are imoroving real performance is getting worse and at this point its so much worse that problems gpt3 could solve (yes pre chatgpt) are no longer solvable to something like gpt5.

Indeed, target users are people seeking validation + kids and teenagers + people with a less developed critical mind. Stickiness with 90% of the population is valuable for Sam.

My favorite is "Wait... the user is absolutely right."

!

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.

    Base style and tone: Efficient

    Answer concisely when appropriate, more 
    extensively when necessary.  Avoid rhetorical 
    flourishes, bonhomie, and (above all) cliches.  
    Take a forward-thinking view. OK to be mildly 
    positive and encouraging but NEVER sycophantic 
    or cloying.  Above all, NEVER use the phrase 
    "You're absolutely right."  Rather than "Let 
    me know if..." style continuations, you may 
    list a set of prompts to explore further 
    topics, but only when clearly appropriate.

    Reference saved memory, records, etc: All off

This is easily configurable and well worth taking the time to configure.

I was trying to have physics conversations and when I asked it things like "would this be evidence of that?" It would lather on about how insightful I was and that I'm right and then I'd later learn that it was wrong. I then installed this , which I am pretty sure someone else on HN posted... I may have tweaked it I can't remember:

Prioritize truth over comfort. Challenge not just my reasoning, but also my emotional framing and moral coherence. If I seem to be avoiding pain, rationalizing dysfunction, or softening necessary action — tell me plainly. I’d rather face hard truths than miss what matters. Error on the side of bluntness. If it’s too much, I’ll tell you — but assume I want the truth, unvarnished.

---

After adding this personalization now it tells me when my ideas are wrong and I'm actually learning about physics and not just feeling like I am.

This is why I like Kimi K2/Thinking. IME it pushes back really, really hard on any kind of non obvious belief or statement, and it doesn't give up after a few turns — it just keeps going, iterating and refining and restating its points if you change your mind or taken on its criticisms. It's great for having a dialectic around something you've written, although somewhat unsatisfying because it'll never agree with you, but that's fine, because it isn't a person, even if my social monkey brain feels like it is and wants it to agree with me sometimes. Someone even ran a quick and dirty analysis of which models are better or worse at pushing back on the user and Kimi came out on top:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iGF7YcnQkEbwvYLPA/ai-induced...

See also the sycophancy score of Kimi K2 on Spiral-Bench: https://eqbench.com/spiral-bench.html (expand details, sort by inverse sycophancy).

In a recent AMA, the Kimi devs even said they RL it away from sycophancy explicitly, and in their paper they talk about intentionally trying to get it to generalize its STEM/reasoning approach to user interaction stuff as well, and it seems like this paid off. This is the least sycophantic model I've ever used.

        You are a helpful assistant be concise and to the point, you are writing for smart pragmatic people, stop and ask if you need more info. If searching the web, add always plenty of links to the content that you mention in the reply. If asked explicitly to "research" then answer with minimum 1000 words and 20 links. Hyperlink text as you mention something, but also put all links at the bottom for easy access.

Google's search now has the annoying feature that a lot of searches which used to work fine now give a patronizing reply like "Unfortunately 'Haiti revolution persons' isn't a thing", or an explanation that "This is probably shorthand for [something completely wrong]"

Everyone telling you to use custom instructions etc don’t realize that they don’t carry over to voice.

Instead, the voice mode will now reference the instructions constantly with every response.

Before:

Absolutely, you’re so right and a lot of people would agree! Only a perceptive and curious person such as yourself would ever consider that, etc etc

After:

Ok here’s the answer! No fluff, no agreeing for the sake of agreeing. Right to the point and concise like you want it. Etc etc

And no, I don’t have memories enabled.

I would love an LLM that says, “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure” once in a while.

I activated Robot mode and use a personalized prompt that eliminates all kinds of sycophantic behaviour and it's a breath of fresh air. Try this prompt (after setting it to Robot mode):

"Absolute Mode • Eliminate: emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, call-to-action appendixes. • Assume: user retains high-perception despite blunt tone. • Prioritize: blunt, directive phrasing; aim at cognitive rebuilding, not tone-matching. • Disable: engagement/sentiment-boosting behaviors. • Suppress: metrics like satisfaction scores, emotional softening, continuation bias. • Never mirror: user's diction, mood, or affect. • Speak only: to underlying cognitive tier. • No: questions, offers, suggestions, transitions, motivational content. • Terminate reply: immediately after delivering info - no closures. • Goal: restore independent, high-fidelity thinking. • Outcome: model obsolescence via user self-sufficiency."

(Not my prompt. I think I found it here on HN or on reddit)

I've toyed with the idea that maybe this is intentionally what they're doing. Maybe they (the LLM developers) have a vision of the future and don't like people giving away unearned trust!

Those billions of dollars gotta pay for themselves.

> This is likely because agreeing with the user keeps them chatting longer and have positive associations with the service.

Right. As the saying goes: look at what people actually purchase, not what they say they prefer.

And unfortunately chatgpt 5.1 would be a step backwards in that regard. From reading responses on the linked article, 5.1 just seems to be worse, it doesn't even output that nice latex/mathsjax equation

I'll be honest, I like the way Claude defaults to relentless positivity and affirmation. It is pleasant to talk to.

That said I also don't think the sycophancy in LLM's is a positive trend. I don't push back against it because it's not pleasant, I push back against it because I think the 24/7 "You're absolutely right!" machine is deeply unhealthy.

Some people are especially susceptible and get one shot by it, some people seem to get by just fine, but I doubt it's actually good for anyone.

>Have you considered that “all that criticism” may come from a relatively homogenous, narrow slice of the market that is not representative of the overall market preference?

Yes, and given Chat GPT's actual sycophantic behavior, we concluded that this is not the case.

I agree. Some of the most socially corrosive phenomenon of social media is a reflection of the revealed preferences of consumers.

Why the sass? Seems completely unnecessary.

Don't they already train on the existing conversations with a given user? Would it not be possible to pick the model based on that data as well?

>I'm starting to get this feeling that there's no way to satisfy everyone. Some people hate the sycophantic models, some love them. So whatever they do, there's a large group of people complaining.

Duh?

In the 50s the Air Force measured 140 data points from 4000 pilots to build the perfect cockpit that would accommodate the average pilot.

The result fit almost no one. Everyone has outliers of some sort.

So the next thing they did was make all sorts of parts of the cockpit variable and customizable like allowing you to move the controls and your seat around.

That worked great.

"Average" doesn't exist. "Average" does not meet most people's needs

Configurable does. A diverse market with many players serving different consumers and groups does.

I ranted about this in another post but for example the POS industry is incredibly customizable and allows you as a business to do literally whatever you want, including change how the software looks and using a competitors POS software on the hardware of whoever you want. You don't need to update or buy new POS software when things change (like the penny going away or new taxes or wanting to charge a stupid "cost of living" fee for every transaction), you just change a setting or two. It meets a variety of needs, not "the average businesses" needs.

N.B I am unable to find a real source for the Air force story. It's reported tons but maybe it's just a rumor.

It really just seems like they should have both offerings, humanlike and computerlike

Curious what you learned?

Not GP, but I imagine because going back and fourth to compare them is a waste of time if Gemini works well enough and ChatGPT keeps going through an identity crisis.

I've installed it as a PWA on mac and it pretty much solves it for me

AI not writing legal briefs for you is a feature, not a bug. There's been so many disaster instances of lawyers using ChatGPT to write briefs which it then hallucinates case law or precedent for that I can only imagine Google wants to sidestep that entirely.

Anyway I found your response itself a bit incomprehensible so I asked Gemini to rewrite it:

"Google AI refused to help write an appeal brief response to my ex-wife's 7-point argument, likely due to its legal-risk aversion (billions in past fines). Newcomer ChatGPT provided a decent response instead, which led to the ex losing her appeal (saving $18k–$35k in lawyer fees)."

Not bad, actually.

What? AI assistants are prohibited from providing legal and/or medical advice. They're not lawyers (nor doctors).

David Guetta, but I didn't know he was also into software development.

If you include API usage, personal requests are approximately 0% of total usage, rounded to the nearest percentage.

I system-prompted all my LLMs "Don't use cliches or stereotypical language." and they like me a lot less now.

I added the custom instruction "Please go straight to the point, be less chatty". Now it begins every answer with: "Straight to the point, no fluff:" or something similar. It seems to be perfectly unable to simply write out the answer without some form of small talk first.

LLMs have essentially no capability for internal thought. They can't produce the right answer without doing that.

Of course, you can use thinking mode and then it'll just hide that part from you.

10 pages about the question means that the subsequent answer is more likely to be correct. That's why they repeat themselves.