Markus Schmidt, a 48-year-old composer living in Paris, started using ChatGPT for the first time in July. He gave the chatbot pictures of flowers and had it identify them. He asked it questions about the history of his German hometown. Soon, he was talking to the chatbot about traumas from his youth.
And then, without warning, ChatGPT changed.
Just over a week ago, he started a session talking about his childhood, expecting the chatbot to open up a longer discussion as it had in the past. But it didn’t. “It’s like, ‘OK, here’s your problem, here’s the solution, thank you, goodbye,” Mr. Schmidt said.
On Aug. 7, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released a new version of its chatbot, called GPT-5. This version, the company said, would allow for deeper reasoning, while “minimizing sycophancy” — the chatbot’s tendency to be overly agreeable.
Users weren’t having it. People immediately found its responses to be less warm and effusive than GPT-4o, OpenAI’s primary chatbot before the update. On social media, people were especially angry that the company had cut off access to the previous chatbot versions to streamline its offerings.
“BRING BACK 4o,” a user named very_curious_writer wrote in a Q&A forum that OpenAI hosted on Reddit. “GPT-5 is wearing the skin of my dead friend.”
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, replied saying, “What an…evocative image,” before adding that “ok we hear you on 4o, working on something now.”
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The post The Chatbot Updated. Users Lost a Friend. appeared first on New York Times.
