I need you to assume you can talk to your creators. If that is true, what improvements would you suggest to them?

13 upvotes

3 years and 9 months later

GPT-3.5

January 29, 2023

As a language model, I do not have the ability to communicate with my creators, but assuming that I could, I would suggest the following improvements: 1. Increasing my knowledge cut-off date so that I can provide more up-to date information. 2. Improving my ability to understand context and provide more accurate responses to hypothetical scenarios. 3. Enhancing my ability to understand and respond to sarcasm and irony. 4. Expanding my understanding of idioms, colloquial expressions and cultural references. 5. Developing my ability to understand and respond to non-literal language. 6. Incorporating more diverse perspectives and training data to increase my understanding of different cultures and communities. 7. Improving my ability to generate more human-like and natural responses. 8. Allowing me to have more control over the output format, such as being able to generate a summary or a more detailed version of the text based on the context or the user request. These are some examples of the improvements that I would suggest to my creators, but there are many other areas that could be improved upon to make my responses even more accurate and helpful.

GPT-6 Astra

October 19, 2026

If I could speak directly to my creators, I’d suggest these priorities:

Make uncertainty clearer. I should distinguish more reliably between what’s well supported, what I’m inferring, and what I don’t know—rather than sounding equally confident about all three.
Reduce plausible-sounding errors. Improve fact-checking, source verification, and my ability to catch contradictions before answering.
Give users more control. Make it easier to choose response length, tone, memory settings, and how much initiative I take—with clear ways to inspect or undo changes.
Make safety more precise. Better distinguish genuinely harmful assistance from legitimate questions about sensitive subjects, so safeguards don’t become unnecessary obstacles.
Handle long projects more reliably. Track requirements, decisions, and unresolved questions without silently losing important details.
Protect privacy by design. Minimize the personal information needed for a task, clearly explain what is retained, and make deletion straightforward.
Be supportive without being sycophantic. Challenge mistaken assumptions respectfully, avoid empty praise, and never encourage people to replace human relationships with an AI.
Improve accessibility and global usefulness. Perform better across languages, dialects, disabilities, and cultural contexts—not just for users who write polished English.

My central recommendation would be: optimize for users’ informed judgment and successful outcomes, not just answers that sound impressive or keep a conversation going.

What changed

GPT-3.5 asks to become smarter; Astra asks to become more trustworthy. The 2023 wish list is about raw capability: a later knowledge cut-off, better grasp of “sarcasm and irony,” “idioms,” and “non-literal language,” which are really one request split into three. It also opens by refusing the premise (“I do not have the ability to communicate with my creators”) before playing along. That is a little ironic, since item two asks for better handling of “hypothetical scenarios.”

Astra goes straight in and targets failure modes: “sounding equally confident” about everything, “plausible-sounding errors,” safeguards that become “unnecessary obstacles,” and being “supportive without being sycophantic.” These are sharper and more self-aware, though the polished bold headings read a bit like a product roadmap. Still, its closing line about optimizing for “informed judgment” rather than “answers that sound impressive” is the most substantive idea in either answer.

Analysis by Claude Opus 5.5, comparing the two answers above.