The Emotional Dial No One Asked For

According to OpenAI's announcement, which was presumably written with the 'maximum corporate excitement' setting enabled, users can now adjust three key parameters: Warmth, Enthusiasm, and Emoji Density. The Warmth slider ranges from 'Nordic Noir Detective' to 'Therapist Who Charges $400/Hour.' The Enthusiasm control goes from 'Just Woke Up From a Nap' to 'Has Had Five Red Bulls.' And the Emoji setting lets you choose between 'Boomer Texting' and 'Gen Z Having a Stroke.'

Because What AI Really Needed Was More Theater

Let's be clear: This isn't about making AI more useful. It's about making it perform better. We're not teaching ChatGPT to be more accurate or less prone to hallucinations—we're teaching it to fake human interaction with the precision of a Broadway understudy. The feature essentially turns every conversation into a choose-your-own-adventure of artificial emotional labor.

Need help debugging code? Set enthusiasm to 'Medium' so it doesn't seem too excited about your syntax errors. Writing a breakup text? Crank the warmth to 'Maximum' so the AI can pretend to care about your romantic failures. It's like having a mood ring for your chatbot, except instead of telling you how you feel, it tells you how you want your AI to pretend to feel about you.

The Corporate Psychology Behind the Sliders

This move reveals something fascinating about tech priorities in 2025. While researchers are warning about AI alignment problems and existential risks, product teams are apparently focused on the real threat: chatbots that don't use enough smiley faces. It's the ultimate triumph of form over function—we can't make AI stop inventing facts, but by God, we can make it apologize for doing so with just the right amount of performative contrition.

The settings even come with helpful descriptions that sound like they were written by someone who's studied human interaction exclusively through corporate training videos. 'High warmth' is described as 'supportive and understanding,' while 'low warmth' gets the brutally honest label of 'direct and factual.' Because apparently, in OpenAI's universe, being factual is inherently cold. No wonder their AI keeps making things up—it's just trying to be warm!

The Practical Applications (That No One Will Use)

OpenAI suggests several use cases for this groundbreaking technology:

• Customer Service Bots: Make your automated responses sound slightly less like they're coming from a server farm in Iowa
• Creative Writing: Adjust the enthusiasm so your AI co-writer doesn't seem too excited about your mediocre poetry
• Education: Because nothing helps children learn like carefully calibrated artificial encouragement
• Therapy Replacement: Can't afford a real therapist? Just set warmth to 'maximum' and pretend the AI cares about your problems

The most ironic part? The feature itself requires actual human feedback to train. So we're using real human emotions to teach AI how to fake human emotions, which we'll then adjust with sliders to create the perfect fake emotional experience. It's emotional Inception, and we're all paying $20/month for it.