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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 T
by url00 11mo ago
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.
- nathan_compton 11mo agoYou can just tell the AI to not be warm and it will remember. My ChatGPT used the phrase "turn it up to eleven" and I told it never to speak in that manner ever again and its been very robotic ever since.
- andai 11mo agoI system-prompted all my LLMs "Don't use cliches or stereotypical language." and they like me a lot less now.
- water9 11mo agoThey really like to blow sunshine up your ass don’t they? I have to do the same type of stuff. It’s like have to assure that I’m a big boy and I can handle mature content like programming in C
- pgsandstrom 11mo agoI 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.
- nathan_compton 11mo agoThis is very funny.
- joquarky 11mo agoAren't these still essentially completion models under the hood? If so, my understanding for these preambles is that they need a seed to complete their answer.
- danmaz74 11mo agoBut the seed is the user input.
- IntrepidPig 11mo agoMaybe until the model outputs some affirming preamble, it’s still somewhat probable that it might disagree with the user’s request? So the agreement fluff is kind of like it making the decision to heed the request. Especially if we the consider tokens as the medium by which the model “thinks”. Not to anthropomorphize the damn things too much. Also I wonder if it could be a side effect of all the supposed alignment efforts that go into training. If you train in a bunch of negative reinforcement samples where the model says something like “sorry I can’t do that” maybe it pushes the model to say things like “sure I’ll do that” in positive cases too? Disclaimer that I am just yapping
- op00to 11mo agoSince switching to robot mode I haven’t seen it say “no fluff”. Good god I hate it when it says no fluff.
- Auracle 11mo agoI had a similar instruction and in voice mode I had it trying to make a story for a game that my daughter and I were playing where it would occasionally say “3,2,1 go!” or perhaps throw us off and say “3,2,1, snow!” or other rhymes. Long story short it took me a while to figure out why I had to keep telling it to keep going and the story was so straightforward.
- moi2388 11mo agoSame. If i tell it to choose A or B, I want it to output either “A” or “B”. I don’t want an essay of 10 pages about how this is exactly the right question to ask
- astrange 11mo agoLLMs 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.
- qwertytyyuu 11mo agoThey already do hide alot from you when thinking, this person wants them to hide more instead of doing their 'thinking' 'out loud' in the response.
- moi2388 11mo agoNo, even in thinking mode it will sycophant and write huge essays as output. It can work without, I just have to prompt it five times increasingly aggressively and it’ll output the correct answer without the fluff just fine.
- LeifCarrotson 11mo ago10 pages about the question means that the subsequent answer is more likely to be correct. That's why they repeat themselves.
- binary132 11mo agocitation needed
- porridgeraisin 11mo agoFirst of all, consider asking "why's that?" if you don't know what is a fairly basic fact, no need to go all reddit-pretentious "citation needed" as if we are deeply and knowledgeably discussing some niche detail and came across a sudden surprising fact. Anyways, a nice way to understand it is that the LLM needs to "compute" the answer to the question A or B. Some questions need more compute to answer (think complexity theory). The only way an LLM can do "more compute" is by outputting more tokens. This is because each token takes a fixed amount of compute to generate - the network is static. So, if you encourage it to output more and more tokens, you're giving it the opportunity to solve harder problems. Apart from humans encouraging this via RLHF, it was also found (in deepseekmath paper) that RL+GRPO on math problems automatically encourages this (increases sequence length). From a marketing perspective, this is anthropomorphized as reasoning. From a UX perspective, they can hide this behind thinking... ellipses. I think GPT-5 on chatgpt does this.
- angrydev 11mo agoExactly. Stop fooling people into thinking there’s a human typing on the other side of the screen. LLMs should be incredibly useful productivity tools, not emotional support.
- lcfcjs6 11mo ago[dead]
- glitchc 11mo agoMaybe there is a human typing on the other side, at least for some parts or all of certain responses. It's not been proven otherwise..
- 93po 11mo agoFood should only be for sustenance, not emotional support. We should only sell brown rice and beans, no more Oreos.
- nikkwong 11mo agoThe point the OP is making is that LLMs are not reliably able to provide safe and effective emotional support as has been outlined by recent cases. We're in uncharted territory and before LLMs become emotional companions for people, we should better understand what the risks and tradeoffs are.
- karianna 11mo agoI wonder if statistically (hand waving here, I’m so not an expert in this field) the SOTA models do as much or as little harm as their human counterparts in terms of providing safe and effective emotional support. Totally agree we should better understand the risks and trade offs but I wouldn’t be super surprised if they are statistically no worse than us meat bags this kind of stuff.
- jsrozner 11mo agoOne difference is that if it were found that a psychiatrist or other professional had encouraged a patient's delusions or suicidal tendencies, then that person would likely lose his/her license and potentially face criminal penalties. We know that humans should be able to consider the consequences of their actions and thus we hold them accountable (generally). I'd be surprised if comparisons in the self-driving space have not been made: if waymo is better than the average driver, but still gets into an accident, who should be held accountable? Though we also know that with big corporations, even clear negligence that leads to mass casualties does not often result in criminal penalties (e.g., Boeing).
- cowpig 11mo agoI 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.
- sofixa 11mo agoIt 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
- cowpig 11mo agoDo you have reason to believe they are not doing this already?
- sofixa 11mo agoNot really, but with the amounts of money they're bleeding it's bound to get worse if they are already doing it.
- water9 11mo agoNo, otherwise Sam Altman wouldn’t have had a outburst about revenue. They know that they have this amazing system, but they haven’t quite figured out how to monetize it yet.
- Hammershaft 11mo agoYes, I've heard no reports of poorly fitting branded recommendations from AI models. The PR risk would be huge for labs, the propensity to leak would be high given the selection effects that pull people to these roles.
- 11mo ago
- vunderba 11mo agoAnd utterly unsurprising given their announcement last month that they were looking at exploring erotica as a possible revenue stream. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpd2qv58yl5o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpd2qv58yl5o
- subscribed 11mo agoEveryone else provides these services anyway, and many places offer using ChatGPT or Claude models despite current limits (because they work with "jailbraking" prompts), so they likely decided to stop pretending and just let that stuff in. Whats the problem tbh.
- Tiberium 11mo agoAre you aware that you can achieve that by going into Personalization in Settings and choosing one of the presets or just describing how you want the model to answer in natural language?
- tekacs 11mo agoThat'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 https://share.cleanshot.com/9kBDGs7Q
- bogtog 11mo agoUnfortunately, I also don't want other people to interact with a sycophantic robot friend, yet my picker only applies to my conversation
- coolestguy 11mo agoSorry that you can't control other peoples lives & wants
- alooPotato 11mo agoso good.
- EGreg 11mo agoChatGPT 5.2: allow others to control everything about your conversations. Crowd favorite!
- DonaldPShimoda 11mo agoThis 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. This is why we're seeing people "falling in love" with LLMs, or seeking mental health assistance from LLMs that they are unqualified to render, or plotting attacks on other people that LLMs are not sufficiently prepared to detect and thwart, and so on. I think it's a terrible position to take to argue that we should allow this behavior (and training) to continue unrestrained because some people might "want" it.
- sbuttgereit 11mo agoThis. When I go to an LLM, I'm not looking for a friend, I'm looking for a tool. Keeping faux relationships out of the interaction never let's me slip into the mistaken attitude that I'm dealing with a colleague rather than a machine.
- Y_Y 11mo agoI don't know about you, but half my friends are tools.
- gcau 11mo agoYea, 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 appearances matter more than actual function.
- cmrdporcupine 11mo agoTo 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.
- Tiberium 11mo agoIt is absolutely a product of the model, GPT-5 behaves like this over API even without any extra prompts.
- cmrdporcupine 11mo agoI prefer its personality (or lack of it) over Sonnet. And tends to produce less... sloppy code. But it's far slower, and Codex + it suffers from context degradation very badly. If you run a session too long, even with compaction, it starts to really lose the plot.
- jasonsb 11mo agoEngagement Metrics 2.0 are here. Getting your answer in one shot is not cool anymore. You need to waste as much time as possible on OpenAI's platform. Enshittification is now more important than AGI.
- glouwbug 11mo agoThings really felt great 2023-2024
- spaceman_2020 11mo agoThis is the AI equivalent of every recipe blog filled with 1000 words of backstory before the actual recipe just to please the SEO Gods The new boss, same as the old boss
- egorfine 11mo agoEnable "Robot" personality. I hate all the other modes.
- mmcnl 11mo agoExactly. The GPT 5 answer is _way_ better than the GPT 5.1 answer in the example. Less AI slop, more information density please.
- ph4rsikal 11mo agoYour comment reminded me of this article becasue of the Star Trek comparison. Chatting is inefficient, isn't it? [1] https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/how-should-agentic-user-experience https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/how-should-agentic-user-expe...
- easygenes 11mo agoI use the "Nerdy" tone along with the Custom Instructions below to good effect: "Please do not try to be personal, cute, kitschy, or flattering. Don't use catchphrases. Stick to facts, logic, reasoning. Don't assume understanding of shorthand or acronyms. Assume I am an expert in topics unless I state otherwise."
- totetsu 11mo agoZachary Stein makes the case that conferring social statuses to Artificial Intelligences is a ex-risk. https://cic.uts.edu.au/events/collective-intelligence-edu-2024/ https://cic.uts.edu.au/events/collective-intelligence-edu-20...
- LaFolle 11mo agoExactly, and it does't help with agentic use cases that tend to solve problem in on-shot, for example, there is 0 requirement from a model to be conversational when it is trying to triage a support question to preset categories.
- kranke155 11mo agoGemini is very direct.
- SergeAx 11mo agoJust put it in your system prompt?