[atourgates]

I've been using ChatGPT fairly regularly for about a year. Mostly as an editor/brainstorming-partner/copy-reviewer.

Lots of things have changed in that year, but the things that haven't are:

* So, so many em-dashes. All over the place. (I've tried various ways to get it to stop. None of them have worked long term).

* Random emojis.

* Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause when 5 launched. But it's back and worse than ever now.

* Weird adjectives it gets stuck on like "deep experience".

* Randomly bolded words.

Honestly, it's kind of helpful because it makes it really easy to recognize content that people have copied and pasted out of ChatGPT. But apart from that, it's wild to me that a $500bn company hasn't managed to fix those persistent challenges over the course of a year.

[estimator7292]

Ah, you've hit a classic problem with <SUBJECT> :smile_with_sweat_drop:. Your intuition is right-- but let me clarify some subtleties...

[totetsu]

Yeah, that’s a really insightful point, and you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head…

[WASDx]

You can customize it to get rid of all that. I set it to the "Robot" personality and a custom instruction to "No fluff and politeness. Be short and get straight to the point. Don't overuse bold font for emphasis."

[JimDabell]

If I tell it no fluff, the only thing that changes is that it starts out with responses like “Sure, here’s what you asked for with no fluff…”.

[jhack]

For the longest time I didn't know you could change its personality. This helps a lot!

[Forgeties79]

> Affirmations at the start of messages. ("That's a great idea!") With a brief pause when 5 launched. But it's back and worse than ever now.

What a great point! I also can’t stand it. I get it’s basically a meme to point it out - even South Park has mocked it - but I just cannot stand it.

In all seriousness it’s so annoying. It is a tool, not my friend, and considering we are already coming from a place of skepticism with many of the responses, buttering me up does not do anything but make me even more skeptical and trust it less. I don’t want to be told how smart I am or how much a machine “empathizes” with my problem. I want it to give me a solution that I can easily verify, that’s it.

Stop wasting my tokens and time with fake friendship!

[SoftTalker]

Drives me nuts too. All the stuff like "OK let me do..." Or "I agree ..." stop talking like a person.

I want the star trek experience. The computer just says "working" and then gives you the answer without any chit-chat. And it doesn't refer to itself as if it's a person.

What we have now is Hal 9000 before it went insane.

[lazide]

Meanwhile, 90% of the population is asking it to write love letters for their bf’s/gf’s

[furyofantares]

> Stop wasting my tokens and time with fake friendship!

They could hide it so that it doesn't annoy you, but I think it's not a waste of tokens. It's there so the tokens that follow are more likely to align with what you asked for. It's harder for it to then say "This is a lot of work, we'll just do a placeholder for now" or give otherwise "lazy" responses, or to continue saying a wrong thing that you've corrected it about.

I bet it also probably makes it more likely to gaslight you when you're asking something it's just not capable of, though.

[antoniojtorres]

The emoji thing is so bad. You can see it all over github docs and other long form docs. All section headers will have emojis and so on. Strange.

[thraxil]

Obviously nothing solid to back this up, but I kind of feel like I was seeing emojis all over github READMEs on JS projects for quite a while before AI picked it up. I feel like it may have been something that bled over from Twitch streaming communities.

[anbotero]

It drives me crazy. It happens with Claude models too. I even created an instruction to avoid them in a CLAUDE.md, and the miserable thing from time to time still does it.

Why?!

[teeray]

You can take my em-dashes from my cold, dead hands—I use them all the time.

[merelysounds]

On iOS in particular the longer dash variants are easy to access — via long pressing dash.

Anecdotally, I use them less often these days, because of the association with AI.

[bakugo]

Don't forget the classic: "It's not just X—it's Y."

[rogerkirkness]

This is the main thing that immediately tells me something is AI. This form of reasoning was much less common before ChatGPT.

[razodactyl]

Absolutely this. I feel like I'm having an immune response to my own language. These patterns irk me in a weird way. Lack of variance is jarring perhaps? Everyone sounding more robotic than usual? Mode-collapse of normal language.

[pimeys]

Or... How can you detect the usage of Claude models in a writeup? Look for the word comprehensive, especially if it's used multiple times throughout the article.

[razodactyl]

"Enhanced"

[joegibbs]

I notice this less with GPT-5 and GPT-5-Codex but it has a new problem: it'll write a sentence that mostly makes sense but have one or two strange word choices that nobody would use in that situation. It tends to use a lot of very dense jargon that makes it hard to read, spitting out references to various algorithms and concepts in places that don't actually make sense for them to be. Also yesterday Codex refused a task from me because it would be too much work, which I thought was pretty ridiculous - it wasn't actually that much work, a couple hundred lines max.

[nomel]

> refused a task from me because it would be too much work

Was this after many iterations? Try letting it get some "sleep". Hear me out...

I haven't used Codex, so maybe not relevant, but with Claude I always notice a slow degradation in quality, refusals, and "<implementation here>" placeholders with iterations within the same context window. One time, after making a mistake, it apologized and said something like "that's what I get for writing code at 2am". Statistically, this makes sense: long conversations between developers would go into the night, and they get tired, their code gets sparser and crappier.

So, I told it "Ok, let's get some sleep and do this tomorrow.", then the very next message (since the LLM has no concept of time), "Good morning! Let's do this!" and bam, output a completely functional, giant, block of code.

Human behavior is deeeeep in the statistics.

[BiteCode_dev]

I think it's the default behavior, because it's cheaper and faster to produce than the real answer.

I assume the beginning of the answer is given to a cheaper, faster model, so that the slower, more expensive one can have time to think.

It keeps the conversation lively and natural for most people.

Would be interesting to test if it's true, by disabling it with a system prompt, and measure if the time-to-answer is slower for the first word.

[psyclobe]

I was able to get it to briefly change that initial You’re right!! By telling it to say something else like Yarr Mayte. Stuck for a while.

[giancarlostoro]

I dont use ChatGPT very often, though perplexity has it, but I find that going all caps and sounding really angry helps them to fix things.

[layer8]

It’s a pity that em-dashes are being much more shunned due to their LLM association than emojis.

[gowld]

> Honestly, it's kind of helpful because it makes it really easy to recognize content that people have copied and pasted out of ChatGPT

Maybe it's intentional, like the "shiny" tone applied to "photorealistic" images of real people.

[neoCrimeLabs]

I am reasonably sure affirmations are a feature, not a bug. No matter how much I might disagree.

[illuminator83]

Also pretty sure it is a feature because the general population wants to have pleasant interactions with their ChatGPT and OpenAI's user feedback research will have told them this helps. I know some non-developer type people which mostly talk to ChatGPT about stuff like

- how to cope with the sadness of losing their cat

- ranting about the annoying habits of their friends

- finding all the nice places to eat in a city

etc.

They do not want that "robot" personality and they are the majority.

[koakuma-chan]

ChatGPT is made for normies—they love sweatdrop emojis. I recommend https://ai.dev

[esafak]

A TPU dies every time you say 'normie'.

[noir_lord]

"normies" such a weird way to divide the world into them and "us".