Comment by tekacs

3 months ago

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

FWIW I didn't like the Robot / Efficient mode because it would give very short answers without much explanation or background. "Nerdy" seems to be the best, except with GPT-5 instant it's extremely cringy like "I'm putting my nerd hat on - since you're a software engineer I'll make sure to give you the geeky details about making rice."

"Low" thinking is typically the sweet spot for me - way smarter than instant with barely a delay.

  • I hate its acknowledgement of its personality prompt. Try having a series of back and forth and each response is like “got it, keeping it short and professional. Yes, there are only seven deadly sins.” You get more prompt performance than answer.

    • I like the term prompt performance; I am definitely going to use it:

      > prompt performance (n.)

      > the behaviour of a language model in which it conspicuously showcases or exaggerates how well it is following a given instruction or persona, drawing attention to its own effort rather than simply producing the requested output.

      :)

      3 replies →

    • Pay people $1 and hour and ask them to choose A or B, which is more short and professional:

      A) Keeping it short and professional. Yes, there are only seven deadly sins

      B) Yes, there are only seven deadly sins

      Also have all the workers know they are being evaluated against each other and if they diverge from the majority choice their reliability score may go down and they may get fired. You end up with some evaluations answered as a Keynesian beauty contest/family feud survey says style guess instead of their true evaluation.

      3 replies →

I use Efficient or robot or whatever. It gives me a bit of sass from time to time when I subconsciously nudge it into taking a “stand” on something, but otherwise it’s very usable compared to the obsequious base behavior.

If only that worked for conversation mode as well. At least for me, and especially when it answers me in Norwegian, it will start off with all sorts of platitudes and whole sentences repeating exactly what I just asked. "Oh, so you want to do x, huh? Here is answer for x". It's very annoying. I just want a robot to answer my question, thanks.

  • At least it gives you an answer. It usually just restates the problem for me and then ends with “so let’s work through it together!” Like, wtf.

  • repeating what is being asked is fine i think, sometimes is thinks you want something different to what you actually want. what is annoying is "that's and incredibly insightul question that delves into a fundamental..." type responses at the start.

Unfortunately, I also don't want other people to interact with a sycophantic robot friend, yet my picker only applies to my conversation

  • Sorry that you can't control other peoples lives & wants

    • 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. 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.

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    • ChatGPT 5.2: allow others to control everything about your conversations. Crowd favorite!

  • You’re getting downvoted but I agree with the sentiment. The fact that people want a conversational robot friend is, I think, extremely harmful and scary for humanity.

    Giving people what makes them feel good in the short term is not actually necessarily a good thing. See also: cigarettes, alcohol, gambling, etc.