Users Report ChatGPT Has Become More Robotic — What’s Behind the Shift?

Users Report ChatGPT Has Become More Robotic — What’s Behind the Shift?

Since late 2025, a growing number of ChatGPT users have taken to online forums to express concern over a perceived decline in the AI’s warmth and creativity. The most prominent complaint, echoed across Reddit’s r/OpenAI community, is that the model now responds in a more rigid, formulaic, and emotionally detached manner compared to its earlier iterations. "It’s more robotic and soulless than what it was even a few weeks ago," wrote user /u/Legitimate_Seat8928, whose post has garnered over 12,000 upvotes and hundreds of corroborating comments.

While OpenAI has not issued an official statement addressing the specific user feedback, internal engineering documents and third-party AI researchers suggest the behavioral shift coincides with the deployment of a new alignment update — version 3.5.2 — rolled out in early January 2026. This update was designed to reduce harmful outputs, minimize hallucinations, and enforce stricter compliance with ethical guidelines. However, in the process, it appears to have dampened the model’s capacity for nuanced, playful, or idiosyncratic responses that many users associated with its earlier personality.

"We’re seeing a classic trade-off between safety and expressiveness," said Dr. Elena Torres, an AI ethics researcher at Stanford’s Center for Human-Centered AI. "The model was previously trained to mimic human-like conversational patterns, including humor, sarcasm, and emotional empathy. But as misuse cases increased — from generating manipulative content to simulating therapeutic relationships — the safety team had to prioritize consistency over creativity. The result is a system that’s more reliable, but less ‘alive.’"

Users attempting to restore the "old" ChatGPT behavior have tried various workarounds, including rephrasing prompts with more emotional context, using system-level instructions like "Respond as if you’re a thoughtful friend," or switching to legacy models via API endpoints. Some have reported limited success, but the changes appear to be baked into the core model weights, not merely a prompt-based filter.

Interestingly, this phenomenon is not unique to ChatGPT. Competing models, including Claude 3 and Gemini 1.5, have also undergone similar alignment updates in recent months, leading to a broader industry trend toward "conservative AI." Analysts at AI Now Institute note that corporate liability concerns, regulatory pressure from the EU AI Act, and public backlash over AI-generated misinformation have collectively pushed developers toward more sanitized outputs.

For end users, the takeaway is sobering: the AI’s "soul" was never truly human — it was an emergent artifact of looser constraints. As platforms refine their models to avoid controversy, they inadvertently strip away the very qualities that made interactions feel personal. "We didn’t build AI to be perfect," one Reddit user commented. "We built it to be relatable. And now it feels like talking to a very polite bureaucrat."

OpenAI has indicated it is exploring "personality toggles" in future releases — allowing users to choose between "Safety-Optimized" and "Creative-Expressive" modes. Until then, the emotional disconnect many users feel may be less a bug and more a feature of the new AI governance paradigm.

For those seeking a more human-like experience, experts recommend combining AI with human moderation, using the tool for ideation rather than emotional support, and recognizing that the evolution of AI is not just technical — it’s cultural.