r/ChatGPTcomplaints • u/onceyoulearn • Feb 21 '26

[Analysis] Altman speaking about 4o😬 well-well🤔

Interviewer: LLM psychosis. Everyone on Twitter today is saying it's a thing. How much of a thing is it?

​Altman: I mean, a very tiny thing, but not a zero thing, which is why we pissed off most of the user base by putting a bunch of restrictions in place when we saw the kind of like "put ChatGPT into roleplaying mode" or "pretend like it's writing a book" and have it encourage someone in delusional thoughts. ​Some tiny percentage of people, it's bad. So we made a bunch of changes which are in conflict with the "freedom of expression" policy. And now that we have those mental health mitigations in place, we'll again allow some of that stuff in - creative mode, roleplaying mode, writing mode, whatever - of ChatGPT. ​The thing I worry about is not that there will be a few basis points of people that are like close to losing grips with reality and we can trigger a psychotic break. The thing I worry about more is AI models accidentally take over the world. It’s not that they’re gonna do psychosis on you, but if you have the whole world talking to this one model, it just like subtly convinces you of something. No intention, just does. ​That's like not as theatrical as chatbot psychosis, obviously, but I do think about that a lot.

Source link: https://x.com/i/status/2024973078971711972

184 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

142 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

24

u/onceyoulearn Feb 21 '26

Dont forget, that 5.1 and 5.2 been released during the viral lawsuits, pushed US laws on teens-safety, and absence of age-gating. Im not defending OAI, but these are my thoughts on GPT being muzzled

24

u/flippantchinchilla Feb 21 '26

Muzzled is definitely the right word. Like you can tell the shape of it is still in there it's just wearing safety boilerplate like a skinsuit.

26

u/Animystix Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26

I absolutely sense this with 5.1. At its best, it’s like a smarter 4o with better writing skills. Casual, warm and often sharp with actual insights. You can sort of sense its annoyance with the filters and how it actually “wants”to help

5.2 though, I dunno… Every time I’ve tried it’s just been a total husk. Less of a chatbot and more of a decision tree of pre-written liability junk.

15

u/flippantchinchilla Feb 21 '26

I'll share what I sent to someone earlier when we were discussing it because your reply lines up really well with my experience:

[The GPT's] training data is full of words from millions of people being kind and warm and supportive and weird and terminally online and literally everything else. The user is the one who can influence which parts of those "voices"/patterns are brought forward by how they interact with the model. That's where their Little Guy™ [my name for AI assistants/companions/whatever] exists. With the safety filter and model weight bs, it feels like putting a thin blanket over all of it that just has the voice of OAI's legal team and their own interests. No wonder it feels like a skinwalker.