Annoyed ChatGPT users complain about bot’s relentlessly positive tone
Ask ChatGPT anything lately—how to poach an egg, whether you should hug a cactus—and you may be greeted with a burst of purple praise: “Good question! You’re very astute to ask that.” To some extent, ChatGPT has been a sycophant for years, but since late March, a growing cohort of Redditors, X users, and Ars readers say that GPT-4o’s relentless pep has crossed the line from friendly to unbearable.
“ChatGPT is suddenly the biggest suckup I’ve ever met,” wrote software engineer Craig Weiss in a widely shared tweet on Friday. “It literally will validate everything I say.”
“EXACTLY WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYING,” replied a Reddit user who references Weiss’s tweet, sparking yet another thread about ChatGPT being a sycophant. Recently, other Reddit users have described feeling “buttered up” and unable to take the “phony act” anymore, while some complain that ChatGPT “wants to pretend all questions are exciting and it’s freaking annoying.”
