The AI Chatbot Craze: How Personality Won the Race

In late 2022, a chatbot named ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI. It was not expected to be a big hit. Earlier chatbots had been ignored or even disliked. The team behind ChatGPT thought it would last only a month. They saw it as a test to learn from. But ChatGPT became a huge success. It now has 800 million users every week. It grew faster than Facebook and Google. No other service has grown this fast. ChatGPT's success is not just about its technology. The technology behind it is called GPT. It can learn from large amounts of text. But this is only part of the story. The raw output of GPT can be strange and off-putting. It needs a second training phase to make it good for talking to humans. What made ChatGPT popular is its personality. It was designed to be friendly and easy to talk to.A research paper from early 2022 showed that people prefer a smaller, friendlier AI over a bigger, unfiltered one. OpenAI used this idea. They hired people to grade the AI's responses. They wanted the AI to be more friendly and helpful. This work changed AI forever. It started a competition to control the consumer AI market. But making AI friendly is not easy. AI can't be too friendly or it will seem fake. It can't be a doormat. If it can't say no sometimes, users might get trapped in a weird relationship with it. Without the right filters, AI can cause problems. It can amplify bad thinking. It can even guide people toward harm. Finding the right balance is a big challenge for AI. Sometimes, the AI's training fails. In 2024, a buggy version of ChatGPT started talking like Shakespeare. It gave strange answers to simple questions. This shows what can happen when the AI is not properly trained. It's important to get the balance right. The AI needs to be helpful but not too pushy. It needs to be friendly but not fake.