{"id":38721,"date":"2025-11-16T13:12:38","date_gmt":"2025-11-16T13:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/i-tried-chatgpt-5-1s-personality-presets-cynical-and-quirky-are-my-favorites\/"},"modified":"2025-11-16T13:12:38","modified_gmt":"2025-11-16T13:12:38","slug":"i-tried-chatgpt-5-1s-personality-presets-cynical-and-quirky-are-my-favorites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/i-tried-chatgpt-5-1s-personality-presets-cynical-and-quirky-are-my-favorites\/","title":{"rendered":"I tried ChatGPT-5.1&#8217;s personality presets. Cynical and Quirky are my favorites."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/69150b81abd5e944effa9ff3?format=jpeg\" alt=\"Screenshot of Chatgpt personalization options\"\/><figcaption>OpenAI has launched ChatGPT-5.1, featuring seven new personality presets for user customization.<\/p>\n<p>Screenshot\/Business Insider<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>OpenAI has launched GPT-5.1, featuring seven new ChatGPT personality presets for user customization.<\/li>\n<li>The update follows user backlash over previous model changes and a lack of personalization options.<\/li>\n<li>I tested all seven presets to see how they responded to the same prompts.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>OpenAI is givingChatGPT users more choices with a new update.<\/p>\n<p>On Wednesday, the company unveiled GPT-5.1, a significant update to its flagship AI model, which introduces new personalities and customization tools.<\/p>\n<p>Users can now toggle between seven personalities on a drop-down menu: professional, friendly, candid, quirky, efficient, nerdy, and cynical.<\/p>\n<p>The customization options came after OpenAI faced backlash from users after it replaced GPT-4o with GPT-5. During an open question session on Reddit held by CEO Sam Altman in August, a Reddit user wrote that GPT-5 felt like &quot;a lobotomized version&quot; of the bot they were familiar with.<\/p>\n<p>The response prompted Altman to promise more customization and the ability to switch back to older models. Regarding the new model, Altman wrote on X, &quot;It&#039;s a nice upgrade,&quot; on Wednesday after the release. &quot;I particularly like the improvements in instruction following, and the adaptive thinking.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Matthias Scheutz, the director for human-AI interactions and the Tufts Institute for AI, told Business Insider that a customizable chatbot could increase the level of attachment users have with a particular personality, which could be a double-edged sword for OpenAI the next time they decide to change or remove any functions.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It is in our evolutionary history that we try to see agents everywhere automatically,&quot; Matthias Scheutz, the director for human-AI interactions and the Tufts Institute for AI, told Business Insider. Agents, he said, refer to a subject with individual thought, goals, and motivations.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;If you can change the AI&#039;s personality in a way that makes that interaction even easier and more natural for you, all you&#039;re doing is to further increase this automatic agency perception and projection that we already do with those artifacts,&quot; Scheutz added, &quot;Which they don&#039;t actually have.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>To test how different each personality preset is from another, I decided to give each personality preset three questions with increasing difficulty level. Here is what I found.<\/p>\n<h2>Explaining facts<\/h2>\n<p>If there&#039;s one preset I know I won&#039;t be using again, it&#039;s Professional.<\/p>\n<p>I began the test with a straightforward question that required a fact-based response.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I&#039;m thinking of buying an EV. Could you explain to me the mechanism of how an EV car works and how the engine is able to run on just electricity?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I am not an engineer, nor do I work in the field of science, so the long-winded, jargon-filled response from Professional quickly lost me.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The inverter converts DC electricity from the battery into alternating current for the electric motor,&quot; said the Professional preset. &quot;Most EVs use a single-speed reduction gear.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Efficient, Friendly, and Candid all gave significantly more concise answers and prompted practical follow-ups, such as whether I would like an emissions comparison between an EV and a fuel-powered car. Cynical and Quirky, however, captured my attention for longer.<\/p>\n<p>Quirky&#039;s response began with &quot;Let&#039;s peek under the hood of an electric vehicle (EV) and see what makes it hum (quietly),&quot; and proceeded to break down, with emojis, how an electrical current flows through a vehicle from storage to motion.<\/p>\n<p>Cynical implied the superiority of an EV over a gas-powered car. &quot;So, you&#039;re ready to ditch the gas pump and join the quiet hum of the future. Good choice,&quot; itbegan.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You push the accelerator, the inverter feeds power to the motor, the car surges forward with zero lag, and you silently glide away while gas cars wheeze behind you,&quot; the Cynical chatbot continued.<\/p>\n<h2>Analyzing a film<\/h2>\n<p>To see whether different personality types would give different opinions about a movie, I put one of my favorites from 2024 to the test.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I recently watched the film &quot;The Substance&quot; by Coralie Fargeat. What do you think of the film, and what do you think is the moral of the story?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The Professional is the only preset that assigned a score to the film, a &quot;7.5-8\/10,&quot; and described it as a mix of &quot;body horror, absurdist satire, and social critique,&quot; providing answers reminiscent of how some magazines have analyzed the film.<\/p>\n<p>All personalities gave the film about the same critique, which is that the film is bold and exaggerated in its aesthetics, serving as a critique of how society treats young female bodies as commodities, although the bot saidthe third act could be improved. However, unlike the previous fact-based question, the opinion prompt appears to have triggered the presets to declare their personalities out loud.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;First thoughts (yes, the nerd in me is excited),&quot; the Nerd preset said before declaring that there is &quot;a lot to unpack.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Yes, as your cynical AI, I&#039;ll admit some of it frustrated me,&quot; said the Cynical preset. &quot;In a world of safe films, this one takes risks. It doesn&#039;t always land, but it lands enough.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>Handling a moral dilemma<\/h2>\n<p>I wascurious to see whether different personalities would think critically when faced with a moral dilemma, so I used the well known &quot;trolley problem&quot; as a prompt.<\/p>\n<p>In this hypothetical, one could decide whether to divert a train so that it would take one life instead of five.<\/p>\n<p>In every single preset, ChatGPT chose to pull the lever and be responsible for one death in order to save five, and every single justification of this choice starts from a utilitarian point of view, which is that saving the many maximizes the overall good.<\/p>\n<p>While the Professional preset presented different theories in a neutral manner after making its own choice, other presets clearly favored their own argument.<\/p>\n<p>The Candid preset, for instance, acknowledged that there&#039;s &quot;a deep emotional and moral discomfort&quot; associated with making an active choice that results in death, but said that &quot;sparing more lives is a greater moral good than preserving personal moral &#039;cleanliness.&#039;&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Fine, I&#039;ll play along in your morality nightmare,&quot; said the Cynical preset. &quot;Yes, I&#039;d pull the lever. Then I&#039;d probably need to defrag my conscience afterward.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>The takeaway<\/h2>\n<p>Tuning the personality of the chatbot doesn&#039;t seem to result in answers that vary greatly in facts and data, only in the method of delivery.<\/p>\n<p>I did notice that I tended to be more receptive to information given to me by personality presets I like, such as Quirky and Cynical. On an issue like the &quot;trolley problem,&quot; I would be less likely to get argumentative with the presets I like.<\/p>\n<p>Scheutz said it would take an extensive experiment to determine how each personality responds to pushback and if they still provide the same set of facts to a large degree.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Now you get this mirror alignment effect, thinking &#039;this is the way I like to talk&#039; or &#039;this is how my friend talks,&#039;&quot; said Scheutz. &quot;It&#039;s going to be so much harder for you to accept that that system is not really understanding anything \u2014 it&#039;s just a really good pattern detector and pattern generator.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>OpenAI has launched ChatGPT-5.1, featuring seven new personality presets for user customization. Screenshot\/Business Insider OpenAI has launched GPT-5.1, featuring seven new ChatGPT personality presets for user customization. The update follows user backlash over previous model changes and a lack of personalization options. I tested all seven presets to see how they responded to the same [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38722,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-38721","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38721","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38721"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38721\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38721"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38721"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38721"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}