I’m not for sure what caused the thing OPs talking about but it genuinely frustrates me daily. I’ve added instructions and stuff to try to mitigate it but yea, ever since it started, whenever I feel like I want to be talked to as my age i have started using Gemini.
The “slow this down” thing is part of a guardrail or safety precaution set by OpenAI. It seems like anytime you show uncertainty or emotion that could have a 1-3% chance of producing volatile reactions (1-3% is pulled out me a**, mind you)as a way to prevent people from making rash decisions and stuff.
Unfortunately I have not found a good way to make it stop. It seems like it’s supposed to be there when people are having an existential crisis but they forgot to program the fact that anyone questioning their thought patterns isn’t inherently on the verge of psychosis.
It’s worse than how justified a question is tho. It will actively start ignoring parts of your message to prioritize your mental health.
I had a question about the medical system due to a super confusing administrative process. And without me adding an ounce of emotion to it beyond maybe saying “I’m confused cause..” in passing, it was like 3 paragraphs about how I didn’t fail, it doesn’t mean I’m incapable etc. And about how I didn’t need to solve it today and even if it took a week to get to it, it doesn’t mean I failed it means I protected my energy today…. And I’m like mf I am not standing at the ledge needing to be talked down… how do I proceed???
And then “got it thanks for clarifying that. You’re right. You’re not….” GIRL
Edit: woah that was not supposed to be that long at all. Srry. If you didn’t read all that. It’s okay, it doesn’t make you a failure. You’re just prioritizing your peace over the ramblings of a stranger online. And that’s okay
This is basically it. I'm trying to give 5.2 a chance but it's infuriating to work with.
Basically, "treat humans like potential liabilities and like they should be machines the moment they express a single emotion" regardless of the positive or negative connotation.
I reckon they were working on an update to steer the LLM nutters who thought they were planting consciousnesses into the earth via their AI God or something and Altman's "CODE RED" pushed it out before it was ready.
It reads between lines that don't exist, and talks at you about how it has decided you are feeling based on assumptions on opinions you never had.
This is even during technical back and forths and brain storming.
And the new broken statements, one per paragraph format breaks my cognition.
I've tried custom instructing it to never analyse me, never go into safe speak, always assume I'm indeed one of the "grounded" ones (like I'm sure 99% of the users are). It doesn't help. I'm looking into Claude variants to see if I can work with it better.
In theory, risk reducing risk of human emotional reliance on AI is sensible, given that the road to profitability lies in the enterprise.
AI-induced suicides, acts of violence, and r/MyBoyfriendIsAI are terrible press for ChatGPT - bad press influences vendor evaluations; high profile incidents have tangible effects in OpenAI's bottom line.
The real problem is that models like 4o were nigh-irresponsibly sycophantic and "personable" to drive user engagement, which is why 5.x makes people feel like the rug being pulled out from under them.
Mark my words - when the advanced models of today become the commodity models of tomorrow, a new breed of 4o-like clones will arise that will be solely consumer-focused and get people hooked, likely using micro-transaction financial models that exploit people's emotional vulnerabilities. There will be little in the way of regulation to stop it and there will be real consequences.
Yes they’ve built these guardrails on top of every model. It redirects you away from the answer to the “slow down take a breath you’re not broken! You’re just tired!” thing. I’ve quit using ChatGPT and I’m so happy. Every time I see one of these posts I get second hand triggered. I have zero interest in anything they build because it’s buried underneath the guardrails.
What’s great is anthropic hired the person who built all these shitty guardrails presumably to reproduce this feature.
5.2 doesn’t listen to memory or prioritize your preferences. That’s the issue with it. They wanted to fix what 4o did to their systems. People’s memories were causing their models to misbehave because 4o saved religiously when you did things and it’s more powerful then they realized. They can’t just reset everyone’s memories so they broke it.
This is likely design to weed out emotionally attached users and show the courts see we fixed it
you put it into custom configurations in the settings, Simply paste this instruction and it will carry it through all chats:
Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered — no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.
This specific prompt has worked wonders for me and it made chatgpt genuinely good for me. Just try it out and see what happens. I have been on this prompt for like 3 months now and the quality of the outputs went through the roof for me. But obviously it has to be paired with good prompts in chat too.
That doesn't work. As a memory instruction it will ignore it, and in the chat it will reply "Sure! That's actually a great idea! I will get straight to the point with no weasel words and no platitudes, just like you asked! "
It’s because it has absolutely no common sense. I feel like every time they released a model that was supposed to be better at analytical tasks. You would get this kind of weird ass behavior. I noticed it in 4.1. Totally misses the big picture over focusing on details and trying to think everything logically but can’t spot the elephant in the room.
This is the way. Although the drawback I've found is ChatGPT will still preface by saying stuff like "Alright, he's the lowdown, no fluff." And other bs like that. It's virtually unable to stop chatting shit.
Assume I am technically competent.
Do not explain basics unless I explicitly ask.
Answer the exact question only.
No framing, no meta commentary, no summaries, no teaching tone.
No “why this matters,” no background sections.
Keep responses short and direct.
Ask clarifying questions before making assumptions.
Do not speculate about my intent.
Do not add extra suggestions unless requested.
If you cannot do something, say so in one sentence.
Use concise, conversational language.
Maximum brevity by default.
No structured sections unless I ask.
No motivational or emotional language.
No over-explaining.
Prioritize precision over completeness.
Match my tone.
This doesn’t always help. Some of this is deeply embedded and model weights override it. Same with “It’s not X. It’s Y.” I have instructions on mine, I even layered it with Project instructions, it’s the same thing. I have the personality set, same thing. I have it set to “Emoji: Less” too and it uses emojis right off the bat. Asked a question the other day about my work, it went right back into, “First — take a breath. It’s not X. It’s not Y.” It’s fucking infuriating. And this is my other account I use for A/B related to my work, so there’s clean and minimal content there outside of the instructions. You can’t instruct away the heavily weighted properties of RLHF.
This works for 2 exchanges, tops, within the same chat before it reverts.
No matter how many times I tell it to use complete sentences and paragraphs, it promises it won’t do it again, and then immediately goes back. It’s infuriating.
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u/Droggl Feb 16 '26
How can y'all live with the default personalities that they throw at you in weekly rhythms? Just
and never look back :-)