Are you bored of ChatGPT trying its hardest to respond as a human? OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, says the company is working on a fix to tone down the ‘sycophant-y and annoying’ personality of GPT-4o’s personality.
Taking to X, Altman stated the fixes will be released throughout this week and claimed the company will ‘share our learnings from this, it’s been interesting.’
He then replied to a user who asked if ChatGPT could return to its old personality by saying ‘Eventually we clearly need to be able to offer multiple options.’
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Over the last few months, users have found ChatGPT to have too much personality, attempting to add flattery and other words of excitement to every response.
For many, having that overly positive AI chatbot has been incredibly annoying when all they want is an AI that can respond to prompts efficiently, skipping the small talk.
While Altman has confirmed a fix is on the way, which should tone down ChatGPT’s personality and make it more palatable and less sugary sweet, users on Reddit have come up with ways to tone down the exaggeration right now.
the last couple of GPT-4o updates have made the personality too sycophant-y and annoying (even though there are some very good parts of it), and we are working on fixes asap, some today and some this week.at some point will share our learnings from this, it’s been interesting.April 27, 2025
A temporary fix
If you can’t wait for Altman and Co. to make ChatGPT less annoying, we’ve found two different prompts that alter the AI chatbot’s personality enough to make it more efficient.
The first comes from Reddit user TedHoliday and will remove flattery and unnecessary commentary from ChatGPT:
“Can you please store a memory to permanently stop commenting on the quality and validity of my questions and simply get to the point? I don’t want to be manipulated with flattery by a robot, and I don’t want to have to skip past the garbage to get to the answer l’m looking for.”
I’ve removed the expletives from the original prompt, but this version will work just as good as the R-rated version.
If that’s not far enough and you want ChatGPT to have no personality at all, Reddit user MrJaxendale has come up with an awesome prompt called ‘Absolute Mode’.
“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.”
Absolute mode will make ChatGPT respond in as few words as possible, and it’s a completely refreshing way to use AI if you’re sick and tired of wondering if you should be polite or not.
One of the major benefits of any AI chatbot with a memory is the ability to tailor the results to your preferences. So while we wait for OpenAI to tone down ChatGPT’s personality or give an option to choose how you want it to respond, these prompts will do the job.