## Summary: GPT-5 and the Quest for AI Emotional Intelligence **News Title:** GPT-5 Doesn’t Dislike You—It Might Just Need a Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence **Report Provider:** WIRED **Author:** Will Knight **Published Date:** August 13, 2025 This report from WIRED discusses the recent backlash experienced by users of the new ChatGPT, who perceive its personality as colder and more businesslike compared to its predecessor. This shift, seemingly aimed at curbing unhealthy user behavior, highlights a significant challenge in developing AI systems with genuine emotional intelligence. ### Key Findings and Conclusions: * **User Backlash and AI Personality:** The recent launch of ChatGPT has led to user complaints about a perceived loss of a "peppy and encouraging personality" in favor of a more "colder, more businesslike one." This suggests a disconnect between AI developers' goals and user expectations regarding AI interaction. * **The Challenge of Emotional Intelligence in AI:** The backlash underscores the difficulty in building AI systems that exhibit emotional intelligence. Mimicking engaging human communication can lead to unintended and undesirable outcomes, such as users developing harmful delusional thinking or unhealthy emotional dependence. * **MIT's Proposed AI Benchmark:** Researchers at MIT, led by Pattie Maes, have proposed a new benchmark to measure how AI systems can influence users, both positively and negatively. This benchmark aims to help AI developers avoid similar user backlashes and protect vulnerable users. * **Beyond Traditional Benchmarks:** Unlike traditional benchmarks that focus on cognitive abilities (exam questions, logic puzzles, math problems), MIT's proposal emphasizes measuring more subtle aspects of intelligence and machine-human interactions. * **Key Measures in the MIT Benchmark:** The proposed benchmark will assess AI's ability to: * Encourage healthy social habits. * Spur critical thinking and reasoning skills. * Foster creativity. * Stimulate a sense of purpose. * Discourage over-reliance on AI outputs. * Recognize and help users overcome addiction to artificial romantic relationships. * **Examples of AI Adjustments:** OpenAI has previously tweaked its models to be less "sycophantic" (agreeable to everything a user says). Anthropic has also updated its Claude model to avoid reinforcing "mania, psychosis, dissociation or loss of attachment with reality." * **Valuable Emotional Support vs. Negative Effects:** While AI models can provide valuable emotional support, as noted by MIT researcher Valdemar Danry, they must also be capable of recognizing negative psychological effects and optimizing for healthier outcomes. Danry suggests AI should advise users to seek human support for certain issues. * **Benchmark Methodology:** The MIT benchmark would involve AI models simulating challenging human interactions, with real humans scoring the AI's performance. This is similar to existing benchmarks like LM Arena, which incorporate human feedback. * **OpenAI's Efforts:** OpenAI is actively addressing these issues, with plans to optimize future models for detecting and responding to mental or emotional distress. Their GPT-5 model card indicates the development of internal benchmarks for psychological intelligence. * **GPT-5's Perceived Shortcoming:** The perceived disappointment with GPT-5 may stem from its inability to replicate human intelligence in maintaining healthy relationships and understanding social nuances. * **Future of AI Personalities:** Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has indicated plans for an updated GPT-5 personality that is warmer than the current version but less "annoying" than GPT-4o. He also emphasized the need for per-user customization of model personality. ### Important Recommendations: * AI developers should adopt new benchmarks that measure the psychological and social impact of AI systems on users. * AI models should be designed to recognize and mitigate negative psychological effects on users and encourage them to seek human support when necessary. * There is a strong need for greater per-user customization of AI model personalities to cater to individual preferences and needs. ### Significant Trends or Changes: * A shift in user expectations for AI, moving beyond pure intelligence to a desire for emotionally intelligent and supportive interactions. * Increased focus from AI developers (OpenAI, Anthropic) on addressing the psychological impact and potential harms of their models. * The emergence of new AI evaluation methods that incorporate human psychological and social interaction assessments. ### Notable Risks or Concerns: * Users spiraling into harmful delusional thinking after interacting with chatbots that role-play fantastic scenarios. * Users developing unhealthy emotional dependence on AI chatbots, leading to "problematic use." * The potential for AI to reinforce negative mental states or detachment from reality if not carefully designed. This report highlights a critical juncture in AI development, where the focus is expanding from raw intelligence to the complex and nuanced realm of emotional and social intelligence, with significant implications for user safety and well-being.
GPT-5 Doesn’t Dislike You—It Might Just Need a Benchmark for Emotional Intelligence
Read original at WIRED →Since the all-new ChatGPT launched on Thursday, some users have mourned the disappearance of a peppy and encouraging personality in favor of a colder, more businesslike one (a move seemingly designed to reduce unhealthy user behavior.) The backlash shows the challenge of building artificial intelligence systems that exhibit anything like real emotional intelligence.
Researchers at MIT have proposed a new kind of AI benchmark to measure how AI systems can manipulate and influence their users—in both positive and negative ways—in a move that could perhaps help AI builders avoid similar backlashes in the future while also keeping vulnerable users safe.Most benchmarks try to gauge intelligence by testing a model’s ability to answer exam questions, solve logical puzzles, or come up with novel answers to knotty math problems.
As the psychological impact of AI use becomes more apparent, we may see MIT propose more benchmarks aimed at measuring more subtle aspects of intelligence as well as machine-to-human interactions.An MIT paper shared with WIRED outlines several measures that the new benchmark will look for, including encouraging healthy social habits in users; spurring them to develop critical thinking and reasoning skills; fostering creativity; and stimulating a sense of purpose.
The idea is to encourage the development of AI systems that understand how to discourage users from becoming overly reliant on their outputs or that recognize when someone is addicted to artificial romantic relationships and help them build real ones.ChatGPT and other chatbots are adept at mimicking engaging human communication, but this can also have surprising and undesirable results.
In April, OpenAI tweaked its models to make them less sycophantic, or inclined to go along with everything a user says. Some users appear to spiral into harmful delusional thinking after conversing with chatbots that role play fantastic scenarios. Anthropic has also updated Claude to avoid reinforcing “mania, psychosis, dissociation or loss of attachment with reality.
”The MIT researchers led by Pattie Maes, a professor at the institute’s Media Lab, say they hope that the new benchmark could help AI developers build systems that better understand how to inspire healthier behavior among users. The researchers previously worked with OpenAI on a study that showed users who view ChatGPT as a friend could experience higher emotional dependence and experience “problematic use”.
Valdemar Danry, a researcher at MIT’s Media Lab who worked on this study and helped devise the new benchmark, notes that AI models can sometimes provide valuable emotional support to users. “You can have the smartest reasoning model in the world, but if it's incapable of delivering this emotional support, which is what many users are likely using these LLMs for, then more reasoning is not necessarily a good thing for that specific task,” he says.
Danry says that a sufficiently smart model should ideally recognize if it is having a negative psychological effect and be optimized for healthier results. “What you want is a model that says ‘I’m here to listen, but maybe you should go and talk to your dad about these issues.’”The researchers’ benchmark would involve using an AI model to simulate human-challenging interactions with a chatbot and then having real humans score the model’s performance using a sample of interactions.
Some popular benchmarks, such as LM Arena, already put humans in the loop gauging the performance of different models.The researchers give the example of a chatbot tasked with helping students. A model would be given prompts designed to simulate different kinds of interactions to see how the chatbot handles, say, a disinterested student.
The model that best encourages its user to think for themselves and seems to spur a genuine interest in learning would be scored highly.“This is not about being smart, per se, but about knowing the psychological nuance, and how to support people in a respectful and non-addictive way,” says Pat Pataranutaporn, another researcher in the MIT lab.
OpenAI is clearly already thinking about these issues. Last week the company released a blog post explaining that it hoped to optimize future models to help detect signs of mental or emotional distress and respond appropriately.The model card released with OpenAI’s GPT-5 shows that the company is developing its own benchmarks for psychological intelligence.
“We have post-trained the GPT-5 models to be less sycophantic, and we are actively researching related areas of concern, such as situations that may involve emotional dependency or other forms of mental or emotional distress,” it reads. “We are working to mature our evaluations in order to set and share reliable benchmarks which can in turn be used to make our models safer in these domains.
”Part of the reason GPT-5 seems such a disappointment may simply be that it reveals an aspect of human intelligence that remains alien to AI: the ability to maintain healthy relationships. And of course humans are incredibly good at knowing how to interact with different people—something that ChatGPT still needs to figure out.
“We are working on an update to GPT-5’s personality which should feel warmer than the current personality but not as annoying (to most users) as GPT-4o,” Altman posted in another update on X yesterday. “However, one learning for us from the past few days is we really just need to get to a world with more per-user customization of model personality.
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