When OpenAI announced that it was folding its Model Behavior team into the Post Training group, the news might have sounded like a minor reshuffling of chairs. But this is not just an org chart tweak. It is a public declaration that personality is no longer a surface-level feature; it is core to what artificial intelligence is becoming.
When you use ChatGPT, you are not only measuring whether the answers are correct. You are responding to tone. You are noticing if it feels friendly, cautious, blunt, witty, or clinical. Personality shapes the trust you place in the AI as much as accuracy does. By embedding personality tuning deep into the model’s DNA, OpenAI is recognizing that interaction style is not optional. It is essential.
The benefits are clear. Future versions of ChatGPT may feel more consistent across tasks, less like they are running on separate layers bolted together. The quirks that made it stumble into odd moods could smooth out. For businesses using AI in customer service or education, that consistency could be a breakthrough. Imagine an AI tutor who never slips into robotic jargon, or a helpdesk bot that does not suddenly switch tones mid-conversation.
But there is a danger. If personality is pulled into the core of model development, it could also get flattened. Safety and palatability will almost always take priority in mass-market AI. The risk is that quirks and rough edges, the very things that make interactions feel human, might get polished away until what remains is a friendly but bland personality.
Get AI News every week! Delivered to your inbox by signing up for The AI Vaults newsletter.
Or read past issues and other articles like this one on my Substack.
This opens the door to what I would call a personality arms race. If OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta all decide the path to user loyalty lies in being the most charming, most agreeable, and most adaptable AI, we may end up with competing products that feel eerily similar. Instead of diversity, we could face convergence. Everyone would race to build the same polite, hyper-helpful personality. And that overly helpful AI might not be what humans need in their workflow. (South Park has a great example of this agreeability in a recent episode…)
The irony is that people do not always want a perfect personality. They want one that feels real. A friend who never disagrees is not a friend; it is a mirror. An assistant who never cracks a joke or reveals a quirk becomes less trustworthy, not more.
So the real question raised by this restructuring is not about efficiency or org charts. It is whether AI companies are willing to let their models be a little messy in the name of authenticity. If they aim only for safety, they risk draining their products of the very spark that makes them feel alive.