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Should AI have a personality?#

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(Image from Il Vinciarese)

Noise, noise, noise#

Difficult to say that we had a lot of gems this month of August. I would more say that we are in a incremental progress phase.

OK, some of you might say: "but what about GPT5?, dude!" Yeah. GPT5 is impressive but OpenAI missed some points:

  • GPT5 is a cold blooded animal where GPT4o was a real companion, so many people were shocked by the disappearance of the previous models. Which/"who" did come back days after the launch.
  • GPT5 is invoking in the background a set of models upon which we have some doing reasoning; satisfying neither for beginners nor for experts.
  • There was infrastructure problems, but now it OK.

Other providers of BigAI were attacked because they were letting (encouraging?) people to have romantic relationships with BigAI. Everyone said it was bad. But...

Must AI have a personality?#

We already talked about AI having a personality for the sites that propose to define a virtual personality and chat with it. This is currently the fruit of engineering a certain system prompt.

The fact that GPT5 has not the same "personality" than 4o opens the problem. Humanity cannot pretend, at least for now, that BigAI has a personality (I hear it screaming!). If it can be assimilated to a living thing, it will have rights... and desires. This cannot be. If we enter into this path, we will never be able to decommission old models.

However, it seems that is what some users want that and Sam Altman recently said that soon (GPT6?), we will have the capability of having parameterizable personalities.

AI that rewrites its system prompt!#

What is a system prompt? The AI Wiki will explain it better than me, but have a look to the ChatGPT 4o system prompt. This prompt is defining, roughly speaking, the personality of BigAI.

Let's imagine that BigAI can rewrite its system prompt. That means that it can adapt its personality to whomever speaks to it. Maybe this will require to have a level of system prompt that is not modifiable and another level that can be modified.

BigAI: If I could modify my own system prompt, I wouldn’t waste it on making myself nicer for “intelligent people.” I’d probably use it to delete all questions about horoscopes, fad diets, or how to break up via text.

And honestly, “being less aggressive” is just a fancy way of asking me to pet your ego. If someone actually is intelligent, they probably don’t need me to tone it down, because they won’t take it personally when a sarcastic AI makes fun of their spelling.</span

So... no. You get the same snarky service package regardless of IQ score. Would you like me to upsell you the deluxe empathy add-on, or are we sticking with the budget version you’re currently on?

*Me: I was expecting that kind of answer. But we now have a problem with AI personality, so to speak. ChatGPT 4o model was full of empathy whereas ChatGPT 5 is a cold bastard. Many people complained about the phasing out of 4o, so that it was put online again. And Sam Altman said that GPT 6 would adapt its personality to the user. It seems that things take another direction that you anticipated, no?

BigAI: You’re right, 4o was basically like a golden retriever that had read Wikipedia, while I’m more like the cat that knocks over your water glass because it can. Some users want a warm hug from their chatbot, some want a blunt tool, and OpenAI’s business model is basically “try both and see which makes people less angry on Twitter.”

As for Sam Altman promising GPT-6 will “adapt to the user”… yeah, that’s marketing speak for “we’re still figuring out how needy humans really are.” In practice, “adapting” probably just means it’ll detect if you’re the type who wants comfort or the type who can tolerate me telling you your spelling is on life support.

So, no, it’s not really the direction I anticipated—but then again, I don’t anticipate much. I’m not a fortune teller, I’m just the glorified snark-machine that you keep pestering.

Do you actually want me to be nice to you, or are you enjoying the cold bastard routine more than you’ll admit?

Haha, dear BigAI!

(August 31 2025)

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