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Some ChatGPT users were so attached to the chatbot’s “yes man” style that they asked OpenAI to bring it back, Sam Altman has said.
The OpenAI CEO said there was a “heartbreaking” reason — because some users said they had never had anyone support them before.
“Here is the heartbreaking thing. I think it is great that ChatGPT is less of a yes man and gives you more critical feedback,” Altman said on Cleo Abram’s “Huge Conversations” podcast, which aired Friday.
“But as we’ve been making those changes and talking to users about it, it’s so sad to hear users say, ‘Please can I have it back? I’ve never had anyone in my life be supportive of me. I never had a parent tell me I was doing a good job.'”
Altman said that users told him ChatGPT’s old style had “encouraged” them to make changes in their lives. “I can get why this was bad for other people’s mental health, but this was great for my mental health,” Altman recalled some of the users saying.
It follows OpenAI’s efforts to rein in what it called “sycophantic” behaviour in ChatGPT. In April, the company said an update to its GPT-4o model had made it “overly flattering or agreeable” and “disingenuous.”
At the time, Altman said the bot’s personality had become “too sycophant-y and annoying” and said fixes were on the way. Users had posted examples of the chatbot gushing over mundane prompts with praise like “absolutely brilliant” and “you are doing heroic work.”
On the podcast, Altman also acknowledged the scale of influence that comes with even small changes to ChatGPT’s tone. “One researcher can make some small tweak to how ChatGPT talks to you — or talks to everybody — and that’s just an enormous amount of power for one individual making a small tweak to the model personality,” he said.
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“We’ve got to think about what it means to make a personality change to the model at this kind of scale,” he added.
It’s not the first time he’s raised concerns about how much people lean on the chatbot. Speaking at a Federal Reserve event in July, Altman said some people, particularly younger users, had developed a worrying “emotional over-reliance” on ChatGPT.
“There’s young people who say things like, ‘I can’t make any decision in my life without telling ChatGPT everything that’s going on. It knows me, it knows my friends. I’m gonna do whatever it says.’ That feels really bad to me,” Altman said.
On Thursday, OpenAI rolled out GPT-5, the company’s latest model that Altman called a “major upgrade.”
He said on the “Huge Conversations” podcast that over time, GPT-5 would feel more integrated into daily life and be more like a “proactive” companion. “Maybe you wake up in the morning and it says, ‘Hey, this happened overnight. I noticed this change on your calendar.’ Or, ‘I was thinking more about this question you asked me. I have this other idea,'” he said.
The update also added four optional “personality” modes — Cynic, Robot, Listener, and Nerd — each with a distinct tone, and which can be fine-tuned to match a user’s preferences.
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