TFA mentions that they added personality presets earlier this year, and just added a few more in this update:
> Earlier this year, we added preset options to tailor the tone of how ChatGPT responds. Today, we’re refining those options to better reflect the most common ways people use ChatGPT. Default, Friendly (formerly Listener), and Efficient (formerly Robot) remain (with updates), and we’re adding Professional, Candid, and Quirky. [...] The original Cynical (formerly Cynic) and Nerdy (formerly Nerd) options we introduced earlier this year will remain available unchanged under the same dropdown in personalization settings.
as well as:
> Additionally, the updated GPT‑5.1 models are also better at adhering to custom instructions, giving you even more precise control over tone and behavior.
I just changed my ChatGPT personality setting to “Efficient.” It still starts every response with “Yeah, definitely! Let’s talk about that!” — or something similarly inefficient.
A pet peeve of mine is that a noticeable amount of LLM output sounds like I’m getting answers from a millennial reddit user. Which is ironic considering I belong to that demographic.
I am not a fan of the snark and “trying to be fun and funny” aspect of social media discourse. Thankfully, I haven’t run into checks notes, “ding ding ding” yet.
Did you start a new chat? It doesn't apply to existing chats (probably because it works through the system prompt). I have been using the Robot (Efficient) setting for a while and never had a response like that.
> Earlier this year, we added preset options to tailor the tone of how ChatGPT responds. Today, we’re refining those options to better reflect the most common ways people use ChatGPT. Default, Friendly (formerly Listener), and Efficient (formerly Robot) remain (with updates), and we’re adding Professional, Candid, and Quirky. [...] The original Cynical (formerly Cynic) and Nerdy (formerly Nerd) options we introduced earlier this year will remain available unchanged under the same dropdown in personalization settings.
as well as:
> Additionally, the updated GPT‑5.1 models are also better at adhering to custom instructions, giving you even more precise control over tone and behavior.
So perhaps it'd be worth giving that a shot?