#chatgpt

After the 5.4 update, ChatGPT uses "goblin" in almost every conversation. Sometimes It's "gremlin." A recent chat of mine used goblin 3 times in 4 messages:

So, it is the vernacular of the first globally connected generation of kids, who — working in tandem and free from constraints, oversight, or rules — developed an epistolary style designed to facilitate belonging by wire to communities that were virtual and spread across the globe. To connect with other lonely oddballs who were thrilled to discuss geeky things. It is the first ever, democratically developed, global, epistolary style and the first consistent style developed in the age of the internet for the internet. We also drew boobs and said vulger things and developed new ways of slinging insults and enraging each other. Like, it wasn't a utopia.

So, when you got online, you pulled or copied or saved all your messages, drafted up what was...essentially an essay of a response — trying to anticipate follow up questions or points of confusion. You planned it ahead of time. You studied your ass off to equip yourself with knowledge in the hopes of getting some replies off the same day you read them (it sounds stupid now, but that was fucking incredible — send and receive a letter same day!? Eesh. I am getting old). Also, because communication was fast, but our time was limited, it was more like faster letters at first than it was like texts. It was a horror to waste round trips on misunderstandings — the person you were collaborating with might only get online Wednesday afternoons. If you were ambiguous, you might waste a whole week of progress just by not being clear! So, we were explicit.

GPT-5 with reasoning (GPT-5 Thinking) follows instructions with a precision we haven’t seen before (GPT-4.1 was the exception, but lacked reasoning). What sounds like a feature flips established prompt-engineering practices on its head. The era of “shouting”—ALL CAPS, exclamation marks, redundant pleading—is over. Clear rules, explicit policies, and structured instructions now rule the day.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let's talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.

What's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a "normal technology", as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It's just tech, everything doesn't have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on.

Yes, we can still use em dashes. And no, I’m not going to stop using them because fucking chatgpt is abusing them. What if they tweak the instructions next week and tell it to use more full stops or commas? What are we gonna do then? Stop using those as well? Hell no. I’ll keep writing however I want, and if someone decides to stop reading what I write because they suspect it’s AI-generated because I use too many em dashes, or parentheses, or any other punctuation or word or whatever, well, good riddance. I’m not gonna miss you.

“The way these systems are trained is that they are trained in order to give responses that people judge to be good,” Hadfield-Menell said, noting this can be done sometimes through human AI testers, through reactions by users built into the chatbot system, or in how users may be reinforcing such behaviors in their conversations with the systems. He also said other “components inside the training data” could cause chatbots to respond in this way.

This is not to dismiss the potential usefulness of AI models. Instead, we need to recognize that we have built an intellectual engine without a self, just like we built a mechanical engine without a horse. LLMs do seem to "understand" and "reason" to a degree within the limited scope of pattern-matching from a dataset, depending on how you define those terms. The error isn't in recognizing that these simulated cognitive capabilities are real. The error is in assuming that thinking requires a thinker, that intelligence requires identity. We've created intellectual engines that have a form of reasoning power but no persistent self to take responsibility for it.

The most noteworthy thing about the public reaction to GPT5 (which Max Read summarizes as “A.I. as normal technology (derogatory)” is that it blew no one’s mind. If you find ChatGPT to be remarkable and life changing, then this next advance is pretty sweet. It’s a stepwise improvement on the existing product offerings. But it isn’t a quantum leap. No radical new capabilities have been unlocked. GPT5 is to GPT4 as the iPhone16 is to the iPhone 15 (or, to be charitable, the iPhone 12).

These aren't abstract concerns. Every anthropomorphized headline contributes to a media environment where tech companies can deploy increasingly powerful systems with decreasing accountability. The public deserves better than coverage that treats corporate products as autonomous beings while letting their creators disappear into the background.

So welcome to the new era. AI is not just using tools we gave it. It now has opinions about how these tools should’ve been made. And instead of asking nicely, it gaslights everybody into thinking that’s how it’s always been.

But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.

I use ChatGPT a lot, and I want my own archive of conversations I’ve had with it.

I use ChatGPT a lot, and I want my own archive of conversations I’ve had with it.

It’s possible that, in the future, we will build an A.I. that is capable of writing good prose based on nothing but its own experience of the world. The day we achieve that will be momentous indeed—but that day lies far beyond our prediction horizon. In the meantime, it’s reasonable to ask, What use is there in having something that rephrases the Web?