Poking this post again, so it won’t be forgotten.
i also tried to open a ticket for it with no response from the support team.
it’s still a major issue. we just need the old gpt-4.1 back.
Critical bug confirmed (loss + rollbacks). Forward to the technical team now, please.
Using 4.1 with Responses API. It’s practically unable to carry out tasks without repeatedly asking for permission or confirmation- even for extremely low risk tasks. I have seen it ask for permission/confirmation several times in a row FOR THE SAME TASK (reply to an email or turn on a light). It can’t take yes for an answer. How are we supposed to make it autonomous on tasks? I have given long, detailed instructions on when not to ask for confirmation and it still does. Then, after it promises it will act the next time the task comes up (reply to a customer email) it asks again! Like it has no memory of what it says. I’ve never seen this kind of dumb performance before.
You might try removing this and/or simplify. Negative prompts can still be a bit tricky.
Feel free to start a new thread in Prompting, and we can take a look.
Could be the limitations of the model too. Have you tried others?
I’ve only worked with openAI until now but if I can’t get it to play its role and answer emails without needing input on every email then I will have to switch. The thing was, a few weeks ago it was fine with the same prompts
I feel you… it’s awful to use good working prompts over time and to have systems and customers rely on it. and then suddenly the same models and snapshots that should retain their quality, suddenly degrade and simply don’t do what they are supposed to do and have been doing great up to a few weeks ago.
I really really hope to get some kind of reply from @OpenAI_Support
I have a reproducible responses call that i check every few days to see if somehow this issue gets solved.
still not solved.
gpt-4.1 forgetting and ignoring instructions in a simple 10 message long conversation.
if i put the developer instruction in the END of the conversation, it works great, if it’s in the beginning, forgets and ignores.
and i can’t put the developer instruction in the End all the time because that way caching doesn’t apply and it costs A LOT.
We’re facing two issues.
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There is performance degradation as compared to performance from last month.
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There is performance degradation between subsequent calls. Such as 1 call extracting 160 questions, and other extraction 40 questions from the same document.
We can’t use GPT5 because it doesn’t support high token context window such as GPT4.1’s 1 million tokens context window and GPT-5 takes longer to respond as it is a higher reasoning model.
I have a reproducible responses call that i check every few days to see if somehow this issue gets solved.
still not solved. and no contact from @OpenAI_Support to even check this.
I tried to open a ticket, WITH reproducible examples, but noone contacted back.
i’m paying X5 more doing workarounds but i can’t continue for long.
@OpenAI_Support please respond in any way or contact so we know what to make of this.
Thanks
Guys, have anyone also seen extreme changes in gpt-4.1?
it’s even a worse degredation than before, since gpt-5.1 got out.
Hi all,
since the previous topic GPT 4.1 Degradation over the past 30 days.
Now there’s another strong degredation in performance in gpt-4.1, since the new gpt-5.1 got out.
i’ve run benchmarks and i see EXTREME changes in how the model reacts, this is quite catastrophic on my end, having users pay for a service, and the product changes extremely and gets worse.
All gpt-4.1 users please run your benchmarks again and type here for changes in quality you might see.
I hope @OpenAI_Support does something about this. i’m quite shocked.
Since the release of GPT 5.1, GPT 4.1 api responses feel like from a bunch of years ago.
Using it for personal projects, was quite amazed with the quality. Now I am amazed with its stupidity.
Same model, same prompts, very degraded output.
HI folks,
Can you please provide some examples of prompts and how those same prompts now give significantly different output?
Logs with message ID’s would be ideal, thanks!
Wow! I was starting to wonder myself!
I use GPT-4.1 for storytelling, and it’s gotten so bad lately that the story progression is actually starting to halt because of hallucinations and a loss of general intelligence! I was starting to look for alternatives before I saw this thread.
I’ve enjoyed GPT-4.1 so much since its launch, and *really* hope that this can be fixed! Or else, I will be forced to “jump ship” with not just the storytelling system, but with everything. Whatever I have to do to get proper AI responses again!
Interesting. I started using the gpt-4.1 API when it first came out and did a lot of storytelling - particulary with images (Vision). But after testing gpt-5.1, storytelling is now far superior - gpt-4.1 is now inferior - even when there was no degradation.
So, before you go, check out gpt-5.1.
Example:
GPT-Image-1
Here is a story about the image using GPT-5.1:
Prompt: Create an entertaining story about the image.
The Night Of The Green Table
The wind outside the farmhouse rattled the windowpanes, but inside the blue drawing room of Grumblethorpe Manor, the only storm anyone cared about was building at the card table. The fire smoldered politely in the grate, oil lamps glowed on the paneled walls, and six very serious faces leaned over a circle of green baize.
They were not, strictly speaking, the sort of faces one usually saw at a gentleman’s poker game. Four belonged to pigs, pink and plump in mustard colored waistcoats. Two belonged to goats, narrow eyed and horned, dressed in jackets that had seen more cigar smoke than laundry water. The pigs had polished hooves and neatly combed ears. The goats had beards that could have hidden entire decks.
The House Of Cards And Hooves
At the head of the table sat Bartholomew Trotter, known simply as Bart. His belly was round, his snout was keen, and his poker face had been perfected through years of pretending not to notice when the farmer was approaching with a measuring tape. To Bart’s left hovered a stack of red and blue chips as tall as a milk can.
To his right sat Prudence, smallest of the pigs, where most of the table could not see her cards. Prudence had the shy eyes of someone who said very little and noticed absolutely everything. She had turned silence into a superpower, and this fact made the goats deeply uncomfortable.
Opposite Bart lounged Gideon, the elder of the two goats, whose horns arched so high that they nearly brushed the framed landscape above his head. Gideon was a creature of rituals: one careful shuffle, one lazy cut, one slow breath of cigar smoke before he laid anything on the felt. Beside him sat his younger cousin, Jasper, whose black and white fur made him look as if he had already been caught cheating and roughly erased.
Completing the circle were two more pigs: Oswald, thick of neck and quick of temper, and Matilda, a sow whose expression suggested that arithmetic, destiny and every secret of the universe were quietly being tallied somewhere behind her eyes.
It was Tuesday, which meant only one thing at Grumblethorpe Manor: The Great Game.
The Rules Of The Great Game
The rules were very simple, and therefore very dangerous.
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Only creatures of the barnyard could play.
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Hands were decided not merely by cards, but by wagers of pride.
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No one spoke of the night when the ducks had been invited.
The buy in was three carrots, one slice of apple pie, and any rumor you had heard about the farmer that week. The carrots and pie were real. The rumor was for entertainment value, because poker without gossip was simply arithmetic with snacks.
That night, the rumor on the table was a spicy one indeed.
“I heard,” Jasper murmured as he riffled his cards, “that the farmer plans to sell the manor to a city gentleman who has never even seen a proper mud puddle.”
Chips rattled. Snouts twitched. The fire seemed to growl. If Grumblethorpe Manor was sold to a city man, everything would change. The drawing room might become a billiard hall, or worse, a parlor for polite conversation about stock markets. The barnyard game would be finished.
The Pot That Changed Everything
Bart cleared his throat, which sounded rather like a tuba being sat upon.
“We shall not panic prematurely,” he announced. “We shall play for it.”
The others stared at him.
“Play for what?” Oswald asked.
“For the manor,” Bart replied. “Winner of tonight’s game decides the terms of our future.”
Gideon blew out a little ring of smoke, watched it waver above the table and vanish.
“The human world does not accept poker chips as legal tender,” he pointed out.
“True,” Bart said. “But the winner will decide how we respond to whatever humans do. Whether we stay, or flee, or politely stage a quiet barnyard uprising with strategic use of mud. The Great Game becomes The Greatest Game.”
No one objected. In truth, all of them secretly believed that fate had been practicing its poker face and was ready to lay down its hand.
The Dealing Of Destiny
Matilda took the deck, because everyone trusted her shuffles. The cards fluttered between her hooves with a whisper like falling leaves. The room fell so silent that one could hear the old grandfather clock in the hallway clearing its throat.
Outside, twilight stretched across the fields. From the window, a single tree looked in on the scene like a nosy relative. Inside, the lamplight turned the smoke into thin silver ghosts drifting over the players, each one perhaps a memory of a hand dearly lost.
The first few rounds warmed them up, as usual. Small pots, conservative bets, polite lies. Oswald bluffed with the flamboyance of a stage actor in a hat too big for him, while Prudence quietly cleaned up modest winnings that somehow piled higher than anyone else’s. Jasper attempted several daring strategies that worked beautifully in his imagination and nowhere else.
It was not until dessert was gone and the moon had fully nudged the sun out of the sky that the hand arrived. The one that would be told and retold for generations of piglets and kids to come: the Hand Of The Manor.
The Hand Of The Manor
The cards were shuffled, cut, and dealt. One card face down to each, then another, then another. The table filled with the soft flut and whisper of cardboard on baize.
Bart looked at his hand and felt his ears grow warm. Two jacks, two queens, and a king. It was not yet a full house, but it peered through the curtains.
Gideon raised one reputable eyebrow at his own cards, then glimpsed the community cards: the flop came down as jack of hearts, seven of clubs, queen of spades. The board was already a battlefield.
“Ten carrots,” Gideon said calmly, pushing the equivalent in chips into the center.
Around the table, chairs creaked. Carrot based currency was never tossed in lightly.
Oswald scowled, sniffed his cards and folded. Jasper hesitated, twitched one ear, then called. Prudence, who had hardly spoken all evening, slowly pushed in her own neat stack.
The turn card fell: queen of diamonds.
Bart watched the room. Gideon’s left ear gave an almost imperceptible flick. Jasper’s nostrils flared. Prudence remained as still as a statue that had just heard something scandalous and intended to think about it for the next three centuries.
“Twenty carrots,” Bart said.
Gideon matched without blinking. Jasper groaned and matched as well. Prudence, without looking up, simply slid in her entire stash.
The river card came down: jack of clubs.
The board now showed jack of hearts, seven of clubs, queen of spades, queen of diamonds, jack of clubs. It sparkled like destiny in printed ink.
There was a long, humming silence in which even the smoke held its breath.
“Check,” Gideon said finally, voice soft.
Jasper stared at his cards, then at the ceiling, then at his life choices, and eventually pushed in his last chips.
“All in. If I cannot own the manor, I shall at least provide a memorable anecdote.”
Prudence glanced once at Bart. Her eyes met his for the briefest of moments, and in that instant Bart had the sudden, vertiginous feeling that his soul had been counted, categorized, and gently shelved.
“All in,” she whispered, pushing every chip she had into the pot.
Bart felt the weight of every brick in the manor settle on his shoulders.
“Then so am I,” he said, and shoved his mountain of chips into the whirlpool.
It was a ridiculous pot. The kind storytellers drool over and sensible creatures avoid. The center of the table had become a glittering island of color, a miniature mountain range of fortunes about to be redistributed.
The Reveal
Jasper flung down his cards with the reckless pride of someone who had very little to lose.
“Full house,” he crowed. “Sevens over jacks.”
Gideon gave him a small, sympathetic smile.
“I folded to self preservation,” he said. “But if anyone is interested, I had four sevens. Enough luck to be suspicious, not enough to be profitable.”
Bart swallowed. The room had become very warm, or else his waistcoat had shrunk.
“Full house,” he announced, laying down his hand. “Queens over jacks.”
Jasper sagged. The ducks in the pond outside could probably feel his disappointment.
All eyes turned to Prudence, who had yet to move. Her cards sat face down, perfectly neat, as if embarrassed by the fuss they were causing.
Slowly, with the theatrical grace of a magician who understands the importance of timing, Prudence flipped them over.
“Four of a kind,” she said softly. “Queens.”
The table erupted. Chairs screeched. Oswald let out a squeal that was probably audible in the next county. Gideon’s cigar fell from his mouth and landed on the tidy little silver tray, where it continued to smoke indignantly. Jasper put his forehead on the felt as if hoping to merge with it permanently.
Bart, to his credit, began to laugh. It rumbled up from his belly, rolled around the room and shook the frames on the walls.
“Of course,” he gasped. “Of course the quiet one wins the house.”
Prudence Makes A Decision
When the commotion finally settled and the chips had been laboriously pushed into Prudence’s new grand pile, all eyes returned to her.
She studied each of them in turn. The old goat whose wisdom carried more weight than his horns. The younger goat whose optimism refused to give up even when his cards clearly had. The blustery boar who disguised his affection with volume, the calculating sow who already knew the yield of next year’s harvest, and Bart, who had lost magnificently and yet somehow seemed lighter for it.
“I believe,” Prudence said at last, “that I have won the right to decide how we face the future.”
No one argued. The rules of the Great Game were sacred, and besides, no one in the room could do that thing with their eyes that Prudence did when mildly displeased.
“Very well,” Gideon said quietly. “What is your decree, Mistress Of The Manor?”
Prudence looked at the window. The fields were a dark sea, the barn a small island, the sky a scattered hoard of stars. Grumblethorpe Manor itself seemed to be listening, its old beams creaking in anticipation.
“If the farmer sells the manor,” she said, “we do not run, and we do not surrender our game. We adapt. We tidy the drawing room. We cultivate an air of mystery. We allow the new human to settle in, and then we introduce him to Tuesday nights.”
Oswald frowned.
“You intend for us to keep playing here? With the human in residence?”
“Precisely. If he is foolish, we shall politely relieve him of his money and invest it in additional feed. If he is clever, he will join the game. And if he proves unbearable, we shall simply let him win for a while. Nothing unravels a human like the suspicion that luck loves him too much.”
The room considered this. It was, as usual with Prudence, an idea that sounded simple until one looked closely and realized it contained sixteen layers of quiet brilliance.
Bart thumped the table with a hoof that left a satisfying, resonant thud.
“Then it is settled,” he said. “Grumblethorpe Manor remains the House of the Green Table. Humans may come and go, but Tuesday night belongs to us.”
The Legend Of Tuesday Night
In the months that followed, the rumor proved true. The farmer sold Grumblethorpe Manor to a city gentleman who arrived with polished boots, a confused expression and a complete lack of experience with animals that wore waistcoats.
For several weeks, he heard peculiar noises from the blue drawing room on Tuesday evenings: the clink of chips, the murmur of voices, the expressive snorting that accompanied Oswald’s bad beats. Being a sensible man, he naturally assumed the house was haunted and decided not to interfere.
Eventually his curiosity wore down his fear. One rain soaked Tuesday, he eased the door open. The sight that greeted him rearranged his understanding of reality in a single instant: a goat with magnificent horns dealing cards, four pigs in waistcoats arguing about side pots, and a dainty sow with sharp eyes who calmly invited him to sit.
“You are just in time for the second round,” Prudence said. “We accept human currency as well as carrots.”
The city gentleman hesitated. Then, proving that some humans are more adaptable than they appear, he took a seat between Jasper and Matilda, accepted a hand of cards and entered the oldest treaty ever forged between species: the agreement that, for the duration of a good game, nothing exists except the shuffle of the deck, the rise and fall of the stakes, and the shared delight of not knowing what will happen next.
Years later, visitors to Grumblethorpe Manor would remark upon the strangely lifelike paintings on the walls, each one depicting animals in fine clothing engaged in some serious but unexplained activity. They would note the faint scent of cigar smoke in the elegant blue drawing room, despite the strict house policy against smoking.
Most of all, they would wonder about the small, green felt table that never seemed to gather dust, no matter how long the room stood empty, and about the persistent rumor that, if one crept along the corridor very late on a Tuesday night and listened carefully at the door, one could hear the faint sound of chips being stacked.
As for Bart, Prudence, Gideon, Jasper, Oswald and Matilda, they continued their Great Game week after week. Some nights they won. Some nights they lost. Some nights the human triumphed, only to discover that his “winnings” had mysteriously transformed into better feed and warmer blankets for the barn.
Yet every night, when the last card was dealt and the final chip dragged across the felt, they felt the same quiet satisfaction. Whatever the humans decided to do with deeds and keys and ownership, the true heart of Grumblethorpe Manor lay at that green table where goats and pigs and, occasionally, one bewildered gentleman gathered to test their luck against the universe.
And the universe, as it turned out, liked to play cards.
Comment: gpt-4.1 storytelling could never come close to the above.
Now there’s another strong degredation in performance in gpt-4.1, since the new gpt-5.1 got out.
Probably because allocation of compute resources has shifted to gpt-5.1 - as it should.
Interesting!
Are you using GPT-5.1 with reasoning?
Yes. For the story: Reasoning Effort: Medium; Verbosity: High.
We also are having much better results using gpt-5.1 for document analysis and document language translations, as well as other use cases.
I’m positively surprised after some initial testing!
GPT-5.1 with reasoning set to “none” did wonders for my less realistic fantasy project. Setting the reasoning to “medium” did wonders for my sci-fi and world-simulation projects. Though, I prefer to keep the verbosity at “medium.”
GPT-5.1 has impressed me so far, especially with how powerful it is even with no reasoning at all!
Perhaps they switched to a quantitized model to handle less computational workflow especially hosting both 5.1 and 5.2 must be tough