Spent Like a Month and a Half Trying to Fix ChatGPT’s Writing Habits
The actual information it gives me is usually solid, that’s the thing. It’s not that it’s wrong or anything. It’s more that it can’t just give me the answer without piling a bunch of other stuff on top of it. Edge cases I didn’t ask about. Pushback on concerns I never raised. And it has these phrases it just keeps going back to, like “the honest read is” or “and honestly?” or calling something “unusually specific.” Little signals telling you how to feel about what it’s saying before it’s even said it. I noticed it a while back and now I see it constantly.
I’ve put a genuinely embarrassing amount of time into trying to fix this. We’re talking dozens of rewrites across months. Multiple three hour sessions just sitting there running tests, adjusting something, seeing how it holds up across a few conversations, adjusting again. I’ve tried keeping instructions positive because telling it to stop doing something either does nothing or just produces a different annoying behavior. I’ve messed with the personality sliders, warmth, enthusiasm, formatting settings, all of it. Had it audit its own responses. Had other AI audit its responses. Tried to target specific patterns and write around them without naming them directly. I’ve probably rewritten the thing twenty times in a single sitting. And it still backslides. Every time.
Been feeling this way since at least 5.3 honestly. Has anyone actually gotten past this or is it just baked in at this point.