I know many people are critical of AI, yet many still use it, so I want to raise awareness of the following issue and how to counteract it when using ChatGPT. Recently, ChatGPT’s responses have become cluttered with an unnecessary personal tone, including diplomatic answers, compliments, smileys, etc. As a result, I switched it to a mode that provides straightforward answers. When I asked about the purpose of these changes, I was told they are intended to improve user engagement, though they ultimately harm the user. I suppose this qualifies as “enshittification”.
If anyone is interested in how I configured ChatGPT to be more rational (removing the enshittification), I can post the details here. (I found the instructions elsewhere.) For now, I prefer to focus on raising awareness of the issue.
Edit: Here are the instructions
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Go to Settings > Personalization > Custom instructions > What traits should ChatGPT have?
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Paste this prompt:
System Instruction: 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.
I found that prompt somewhere else and it works pretty well.
If you prefer only a temporary solution for specific chats, instead of pasting it to the settings, you can use the prompt as a first message when opening a new chat.
I agree that the change in tone is only a slight improvement. The content is mostly the same. The way information is presented does affect how it is perceived though. If the content is buried under a pile of praise and nice-worded sentences, even though the content is negative, it is more likely I’ll misunderstand or take some advice less serious, so not to the degree as it was meant to be, just to let me as a user feel comfortable. If an AI is too positive in its expression just to make me as a user prefer it over another AI, even though it would be better to tell me the facts straight forward, it’s only for the benefit of OpenAI (as in this case), and not for the user. I gotta say that is what Grok is better at, it feels more direct and not talking around the facts, it gives clearer statements despite its wordiness. It’s the old story of “letting feel somenone good” versus “being good, even when it hurts”, by being more direct when it needs to be to get the message across. The content might be the same, but how it is taken by the listener and what he will do with it also depends on how it is presented.
I appreciate your comment that corrects the impression of the tone being the only or most important part, highlighting the content will mostly be the same. Just adding to it that the tone of the message also has an influence that is not to be underestimated.
Yeah you’re right. I didn’t want to write a long essay but I thought about recommending Grok. In my experience, it tries to bullshit people a bit more than other services do. But the tone is different. I found deep within, it has the same bias towards positivity, though. In my opinion it’s just behind a slapped on facade. Ultimately similar to slapping on a prompt onto ChatGPT, just that Musk may have also added that to the fine-tuning step before.
I think there is two sides to the coin. The AI is the same. Regardless, it’ll tell you like 50% to 99% correct answers and lie to you the other times, since it’s only an AI. If you make it more appeasing to you, you’re more likely to believe both the correct things it generates, but also the lies. It really depends on what you’re doing if this is a good or a bad thing. It’s argualby bad if it phrases misinformation to sound like a Wikipedia article. Might be better to make it sound personal, so once people antropormorphize it, they won’t switch off their brain. But this is a fundamental limitation of today’s AI. It can do both fact and fiction. And it’ll blur the lines. But in order to use it, you can’t simultaneously hate reading it’s output. I also like that we can change the character. I’m just a bit wary of the whole concept. So I try to use it more to spark my creativity and less so to answer my questions about facts. I also have some custom prompts in place so it does it the way I like. Most of the times I’ll tell it something like it’s a professional author and it wants to help me (an amateur) with my texts and ideas. That way it’ll give more opinions rather than try and be factual. And when I use it for coding some tech-demos, I’ll use it as is.