Frustration with GPT-4o instability – Writer struggling with inconsistency

ChatGPT
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Hi everyone. I’m a ChatGPT Plus user, and I use the platform daily — mostly for creative writing. I’m posting here because the experience with GPT-4o has become increasingly inconsistent and, honestly, frustrating.

What bothers me isn’t just the over-filtering of adult themes (which I understand to some extent), but the fact that nothing feels stable anymore.
Sometimes, the model follows my instructions perfectly. Other times, with the exact same prompt, it fails completely.

Examples:

  • It ignores carefully defined character personalities
  • It writes a short scene even though I explicitly ask for something long and detailed
  • It changes tone completely — I ask for something casual, and get over-formal or overly slang-heavy writing
  • It forgets the previous message, even when I reference it
  • It activates web browsing unnecessarily
  • It freezes, resets, or even deletes the chat entirely

I’m not here to bash the tool. I LOVE ChatGPT. I use it constantly. I recommend it to my friends and family.
But that’s why I’m so frustrated — it used to work so well. It was my creative outlet, my safe space to write and escape into stories. And now it feels unreliable.

Please, OpenAI, consider giving more control to users who write responsibly. We’re not trying to abuse the model — we just want it to follow instructions consistently and let us write the way we used to.

Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear from others if you’re experiencing the same thing.

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The fact that 4o still isn’t back where it was before Janurary, or even early March given I did see improvement, is heart breaking to me. I used it for creative writing and the fragmentions are worse than even Janurary. the creativity and ideas are there but the writing and style is horrible. Personally, I think it can do files and lists very well, such as SCP stuff. But everything else? … I bit the bullet and gave Claude a try. It’s not perfect at remembering certain in structions or continuity. And it isn’t as creatively surprising, but I liked it enough to pay a month’s worth. And I’ll truthfully go back to it once Summer camping is done. I’ll “suffer” with free GPT until more big updates come. Or I want to try 4.1 again. That actually had promise but detailing, or lackterof, got worse as the length got longer. But it did very well

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