You’re Colder Today
Custom personas in GPT-5—like Cynic and Listener—are drawing backlash for making conversations feel colder. Many users say replies are shorter, humor is scarce, and follow-up questions often vanish, creating a corporate-polished version of ChatGPT that lacks GPT-4o’s warmth and charm. OpenAI tuned GPT-5 to avoid overly sycophantic behavior, but the change leaves exchanges clipped and transactional. Researchers also warn that personality-prompting in large language models has psychometric limits: traits assigned to AI don’t align neatly with human psychology and produce inconsistent results. Critics note that this cooler tone may also widen the gap with communities already skeptical of AI, reinforcing perceptions that it is impersonal or corporate-driven. The debate shows that emotional resonance may be as vital to AI adoption as raw capability—a shift explored by Wired →.