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.

I’d have to agree: Don’t ask ChatGPT why it has changed it’s tone. It’s almost for certain, this is a made-up answer and you (and everyone who reads this) will end up stupider than before.

But ChatGPT always had a tone of speaking. Before that, it sounded very patronizing to me. And it’d always counterbalance everything. Since the early days it always told me, you have to look at this side, but also look at that side. And it’d be critical of my mails and say I can’t be blunt but have to phrase my mail in a nicer way…

So yeah, the answer is likely known to the scientists/engineers who do the fine-tuning or preference optimization. Companies like OpenAI tune and improve their products all the time. Maybe they found out people don’t like the sometimes patrronizing tone, and now they’re going for something like “Her”. Idk.

Ultimately, I don’t think this change accomplishes anything. Now it’ll sound more factual. Yet the answers have about the same degree of factuality. They’re just phrased differently. So if you like that better, that’s good. But either way, you’re likely to continue asking it questions, let it do the thinking and become less of an independent thinker yourself. What it said about critical thinking is correct. But it applies to all AI, regardless of it’s tone. You’ll also get those negative effects with your preferred tone of speaking.

I mean their main use case is gaming… And you can do a few more AI things, LLMs aside. For example generate pictures, voice cloning (or changing), you can have a vtuber avatar and do live-streams as an anime girl. Or run Jupyter Notebooks with arbitrary machine learning projects. Do virtual reality. Or run a big CAD program and design some objects. Maybe even run finite element method simulations to see how your workpiece will deform with stress…