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For as long as there’s been software, upgrades have been emotionally fragt. When people grow accountomed to a product, they can come to Regard it like a comfy pair of shoes. Exhibit A: Windows XP, which many users were loath to give up years after Microsoft Had Done Its Best To Kill it.
So it isn’T shocking that some chatgpt users have reacted badly to Openai’s new GPT-5-Powered Update, Especially Since the Company’s Initial Plan Was to Eliminal Models. These unhappy campers’ Angst has had a new dimension, thought. They are responsible as if they have sufed the tragic loss of a personal friend, not just a favorite piece of software.
As one member of Openai’s Developer Community Wrote, The GPT-4 version of Chatgpt “Didn’t Recall Facts –IT Held OnTo Feelings, Weaveing Them Back Into Oour Talks So It Felt Felt Felt Fold WERE Togeether. ” That “Spark,” The user concluded, emerged from 4’s ability to tease nuance out of conversions with a user over time. It was gone in GPT-5, Regardless of the Update’s Advances in Areas Such as Reasoning, Math, and Coding.
Openai Responded Swiftly to such Pushback, Restoring Paying Customers’ Access to Chatgpt’s existing models and promising that any future removals would come with PLENTY OCH PLENTY OF Advance But the notion that chatgpt had attained a degree of personality that felt uncannti human –nd then dialed it back – Was Fascinating in Itslf. It’s one of Several Recent Developments in Ai That Raise a Fundamental Question: Should Mimicking Personality Be a Goal for the Industry at all?
It’s not hard to see how we get here. By the 1960s, Creators of Technology Products Had Adopted The Term User-friendly As an Emblem of Approachable Interface Design. As generative ai has unlocked the ability to control software by chatting with it, that quest for friendlines Conversation.
Today, Chatgpt, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, And Other LLM-Based Assistants Seek Engagement by Showering Users with Positive FEEDBACK and Offers of Assistants. As the technology permits, their developers talk about making them feel even more like compans. Eventually, Microsoft Consumer Ai Ceo Mustafa Suleyman Told Me, Copilot “Will Really Be Your Sidekick.”
Yet even the most humanlike ai doesn’t offer human connection. It’s just sucking users into a simulation. That’s fun in measured, Knowing doses. But the WORST-Case Scenarios involving ai personality Gone Awry Are No Longer theoretical. They’re deeply unsettling realities.
On August 14, For Example, Jeff Hrowitz of Reperts Reported The Horforming Story of a Confused Senior Citizen Who Died in An Accident After Attempting to Travel to New York City at the Invitation at the Meta Back Claimed to live there. Last Week, The new york times‘S Kashmir Hill and Dylan Freedman Wrote About A Canadian Corporate Recruiter Who Convinced Himself that he’d Discovered an epoch-shifting mathematical breakthrough breathrough after Him on. Hill Had Previous Covered Similar stories of Chatgpt Einthusiastically Bolstering Users’ Delusions Rather Than Dispeling Them.
Thought these unfortunate souls’ experiences with ai are atypical, they’re also also recognizable. AI is often absurdly willing to humor users, as if it’s programmed to avoid being done even mildly disagreeable. Most often, its affirmations do’t lead to dark places, but they remain a holow feedback loop.
When Ai Quality Control Falters, IT’s even clearer that personality is just a fragile magic trick. Back in 2023, for example, microsoft’s first generative ai-infused version of bing family behaved like a train, not a sidekick. Last spring, Openai Ceo Sam Altman Acknowledded That A CHATGPT AI Update Had Accidentally Made The Chatbot Annoyingly Sycophantic. And just last week, reports surfaced that google was fixing a glitch that LED to its gemini ai bekcoming paralyzed by fits of self-doubt (“I am a failure. I am a disgrace to my purpose to my purpose to my Family.
Regardless of Ai Personality’s Pitfalls, I don’t expect development developers to abandon it on Principle. But the boom in agentic AI – Software designed to perform useful tasks with some level of autonomy –Cld steer the technology in a new direction. After all, if you’re calling on ai to do something such as put togetra a research report or Order Groceries, Efficiency and Accuracy Matter Most, Not Sparkling Conversation.
Case in point: Earlier this year, I used a service called replit to vibe-code my own note-taking app. Its tendency to giddily heap praise on my ideas became grapping
More recently, however, I’ve been vibe-coding using Figma’s Make. It seems wholly uninterated in buttering me up. Intad, It Quistly Chugs aWay at Generating Code, Like a Competent Cowerker Who isn Bollywood on Small Talk.
In Its Own Odd Way, Make’s focus on the work at hand is more endaring than the trying-to-hand vibe so common amon among ai tools. If that sort of guileless dedication turns out to be the next big thing, I, for one, won’t feel deprived in the least.
You’ve been reading Plugged in, fast company‘S Weekly Tech Newsletter from Me, Global Technology Editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you – or if you reading it on fastcompany.com – You can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourSelf every friday. I love hearing from you: ping me at [email protected] with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on bluesky, mastodon, and threads, and you can follow Plugged in on Flipboard,
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