- OpenAI has rolled back the ChatGPT 4o update that caused the chatbot’s AI personality to be ‘sycophantic’
- CEO Sam Altman claims more fixes are coming
- We could see a personality selection option in ChatGPT in the future
Following Sam Altman claiming ChatGPT 4o’s personality had become ‘annoying’, OpenAI has now made changes to the AI model, rolling back last week’s update.
The company posted a blog post on its website highlighting the issue that had caused ChatGPT to become more ‘flattering or agreeable – often described as sycophantic.’
Users found the update infuriating, with CEO Sam Altman sharing on X earlier this week that the company was working on a fix for the ‘annoying’ behaviour.
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
In the blog post, OpenAI says, “In last week’s GPT‑4o update, we made adjustments aimed at improving the model’s default personality to make it feel more intuitive and effective across a variety of tasks.”
“However, in this update, we focused too much on short-term feedback, and did not fully account for how users’ interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time. As a result, GPT‑4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.”
In an effort to prevent this from happening moving forward, the company has highlighted how it looks to address sycophancy in the future.
For starters, training will be used to ‘steer the model away from sycophancy’ as well as added guardrails put in place to ‘increase honesty and transparency’.
OpenAI also plans to add more ways for users to provide feedback on updates before they are rolled out to the wider public.
More personality updates to come
we started rolling back the latest update to GPT-4o last night it’s now 100% rolled back for free users and we’ll update again when it’s finished for paid users, hopefully later today we’re working on additional fixes to model personality and will share more in the coming daysApril 29, 2025
Following the rollback of the ChatGPT 4o update, Altman wrote on X, “we’re working on additional fixes to model personality and will share more in the coming days.”
Putting two and two together, it looks like users might get a ChatGPT personality selection tool in the future. OpenAI’s blog post mentions the company is “building new, easier ways for users to shape ChatGPT’s behavior” beyond custom instructions.
If you want to go further and change ChatGPT’s personality yourself, we recommend trying the following prompt Reddit user TedHoliday:
“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.”
