There was a phase when ChatGPT would respond to everything I said, even in the same request with something like “..here’s the thing that you asked for, of course, without the fluff.” Or blah blah blah “straight to the point.” Or some such thinly veiled euphemisms. No matter how many times I told it not to talk like that, it didn’t work until I found that “core memory”.
This happened to me too. I eliminated it in text responses, but eventually figured out that there's a system prompt in voice mode that says to do this (more or less) regardless of any instructions you give to the contrary. Attempting to override it will just make it increasingly awkward and obvious.
Might not be the best fix but other than disabling memory I changed the setting ‘ChatGPT personality’ to ‘Robot’ and I’ve always had straight to the point answers (so far).
I add "Terse, no commentary" to a request, which it will obey, but then immediately return to yammering in a follow-up message. However, this is in Incognito; maybe there's a setting when logged in.
You can add a custom instruction in settings. That works pretty well, applies to all chats. Memory feature I of course disabled as soon as it was released so I don't know which takes precedence.
Same. The GPT5 “Robot” persona does what no custom “be terse”, “no fluff”, etc. custom prompt ever could. It actually makes ChatGPT terse and to-the-point and eliminates (or at least greatly reduces) fluff. I love it.
Interesting, that's been driving me absolutely bananas, especially in the voice chat where it takes up like 60% of the response. What kind of core memory did you turn off and how did you find it?
It was something I instructed it once and forgot about. When I checked in the settings under “memories” I finally discovered the culprit and removed it.
I’m not sure about voice chat, though - it’s equally frustrating for me. Often, it’s excessively verbose, repeating my question with unnecessary commentary that doesn’t contribute to the answer. I haven’t tried the personality tweaks they recently introduced in the settings - I wonder if those also affect voice chat, because that could be a potential solution.
I hate that. ChatGPT makes itself sound smarter through compression and insider phrasing, and the output is harder to read without adding real clarity. That's why I can't use o3 or GPT-5. The performance layer gets in the way of the actual content, and it's not worth parsing through. I'm mostly avoiding it now.
