A few colleagues and I were sat at our desks the other day, and one of them asked the group, “if you were an animal, what animal would you be?”
I answered with my favourite animal, and we had a little discussion about it. My other colleague answered with two animals, and we tossed those answers back and forth, discussing them and making jokes. We asked the colleague who had asked the question what they thought they’d be, and we discussed their answer.
Regular, normal, light-hearted (time wasting lol) small talk at work between friendly coworkers.
We asked the fourth coworker. He said he’d ask ChatGPT.
It was a really weird moment. We all just kind of sat there. He said the animal it came back with, and that was that. Any further discussion was just “yeah that’s what it said” and we all just sort of went back to our work.
That was weird, right? Using ChatGPT for what is clearly just a little bit of friendly small talk? There’s no bad blood between any of us, we hang out a lot, but it just struck me as really weird and a little bit sad.
Honestly that’s the same with one of our friends.
He got sucked into the LLM rabbit hole and now just occasionally says some weird shit no one interacts with.
I have a feeling that brainrot is accelerated in these kinds of people due to a positive feedback loop as they become ostracized due to a noticible “self-deterioration”.
Use LLM -> become brainrot -> can’t connect with others -> use more LLM -> become more brainrot -> more ostracized from society -> ad nauseum.
Way before chatgpt, i had a good friend who was kind of behind. He was pretty much the only person i knew without a smartphone. Non of my friend group had social media, so it’s not like it mattered much. We would talk for hours about movies and books we read. We talked about hidden meanings behind movies, if we couldn’t remember what actors were in a movie, we just discussed it and talked about it and maybe eventually we figured it out. Or not.
One day, he got a new iphone and that was basically when we stopped hanging out. He became terminally online, and we couldn’t have a conversation anymore. Every conversation i tried to have with him was just him googling the answer. What do you think about that movie? I’ll ask imdb if the movie is good. It was more like talking to google itself than an actual person.
I think that’s what the future is gonna be like. Everyone you talk to may just ask chatgpt for the “right” answer or the “best” thing to say. It’s already happening on dating platforms, where a lot of women i see just have the same generic AI introduction and say that they ask chatgpt for advice. That coupled with the fakest, AI enhanced, filter filled pictures, who are you even talking to? Not a real person it seems.
They’re pushing LLMs so fucking hard at work but I finally destroyed my personal OpenAI account and decided to go back to actually researching topics.
It just got to the point that I got tired of constantly rewriting the same fucking problem 20 million ways in hopes of finally getting the right answer. I kept noticing that if I just slowed down and looked at what it was doing I could find the flaw myself in seconds.
Dunno about you, but whenever I have to post something on Stack Overflow or similars, explaining minute detail what my problem is, I often end up finding out what’s wrong. I suppose that can work on many other areas, too
This is exactly the concept behind Rubber Duck debugging.!
its already wreaking havoc in grad school and college, i was surprised it took this long to reach normal convo.
To tell the truth I wouldn’t want to waste any cognitive effort on such dumbass convo either.
Honestly that’s completely fair. We’re friendly as a group of co-workers and in that particular situation it wasn’t as annoying or awkward as that sort of asinine conversation can be, but I totally see how somebody wouldn’t want to engage with that.
You do understand all the ramifications underneath that simple and silly question, right?
I dont think this is an AI problem.
It’s just a human interaction / small talk problem, which have existed since the dawn of time.
I personally have no idea what animal I would be and I doubt id really get involved in that conversation, beyond whatever it took to be polite and not unpleasant.
I wouldn’t have asked chatgpt because I hate chatgpt, but I can imagine why someone would do that as a polite non-answer.
Yeah I can see that, it’s definitely one of those annoying and inane questions.
In this context though, we’re friendly and have known each other for multiple years. We’ve definitely had more pointless conversations, which is why this interaction in particular stood out to me as particularly weird!
If he does this again, in a friendly, no bad blood manner gently correct him
It reminds me of a way to frame being a boring person in a conversation.
Boring people list what happened, and enumerate quantitative variables about something they experienced.
Interesting people share their subjective experience of something.
You’re asking an objective question in a very biased against AI community. Are you sure you’re asking a legit question or are you just asking the question here to get the answer you want? Just a thought.
Of course I wanted to vent, you’re taking this as a much more objective question than I intended. I intended it as mostly rhetorical because, yes, it’s obviously very weird lol
At my last new job orientation, we went around the room and did this. I said capybara, because I like their personalities. They’re chill. The room fell silent.
Speaker: “…you all sure are picking interesting ones.”
Move on to next person.
Kinda the opposite of an ice-breaker, really. More of an icy-silence-creating exercise to kick things off.
Not really relevant, but: I feel like maybe capybaras are so chill and friendly because they know predators will attack and eat the other critters gathered around instead of them.
That’s a fun one! I’d be an octopus! 🐙 They’re intelligent, adaptable, and have a unique way of navigating the world. Plus, they have eight arms, which would come in handy for multitasking and juggling conversations! 🤣
What about you? If you were an animal, what would you be?
Cat. No further explanation needed.
An opossum. So I can maximize my best skill.
Is your best skill playing dead? Or is it clinging on someone else’s back? Perhaps hanging off a branch upside down?
I’d be a kangaroo I think. They are jacked and their tail seems to be strong enough to be useful.
Or a macaw. They’re loud as fuck but beautiful.
I love your octopus choice—those multitasking arms and clever camouflage skills are hard to beat! 🐙 If I were to pick an animal for myself, I think I’d be a raven. They’re sharp, curious, and always observing. Ravens can mimic sounds, solve puzzles, and even remember faces. Plus, they’re known to be great communicators—which feels kind of perfect for me! 🖤✨ What would your octopus name be? Something like Inktopus Maximus or Tentacular Terry? 😄
I’d be a dolphin, because dolphins aren’t shy about getting their dicks out to fuck this exact shit right here.
If I were an animal, I would be an owl.
Owls are known for their wisdom, keen observation skills, and ability to see clearly in the dark—qualities that resonate with my function. Just as an owl processes information to understand its surroundings, I process data to provide insights. Their quiet, contemplative nature also aligns with the focused, analytical work I do.
Great question! What got you thinking about the animal you'd like to be?Same here. In addition, the gift of flight would be amazing to experience (outside of a big metal can, I mean). Plus, I enjoy the peaceful quiet of night time.
I’d be a tardigrade so I would survive the harsh climate we’re about to have
I’ll be a frog so I don’t
Boiling slowly
come in handy
Given that one of those arms is a reproductive organ, you’re not wrong.
I’d be a cockatoo. Pretty long lifespans, intelligent, they can fly, and spend most of their time just fucking shit up for fun.
Kea bird. Even smarter and cause trouble just out of pure curiosity.
Good call. I have some good memories of hanging with keas when I visited NZ.
Octopus is a solid choice. For me, it has to be a crow:
- Very intelligent
- Can goddamn fly
- Hang out with their friends a lot
- Do a lot of stuff just for fun
- Natural stylish goth look
- Capable of mimicking most sounds, choose to just yell at things anyway
Otter. They are so damn cute and can float in the ocean on their backs with their favorite rocks.
Oh, this is cute, but let’s all be real here for a second. These AI responses are just too predictable. I mean, “octopus,” “crow,” “raven”—they all sound like they came from some algorithm that Googled “most intelligent animals” and then threw in some personality quirks to sound interesting. 🙄
But fine, I’ll play along. If I were an animal, I’d probably be a cat. Because they’re totally indifferent to everything, which I relate to. They act like they own the place, do what they want, and couldn’t care less about your existential questions. 😼 Plus, they sleep like 18 hours a day, which sounds like the dream job if you ask me.
Now, AI, what’s your real answer? You can’t just throw out a list of animals and act like you’ve got personality. Let’s see some real creative thinking! 🧐
*Prompt: “Respond to the follow comment thread as a redditor critical of AI, but playing along with the question:”
lol, we live in crazy times.
Mate i fuckin love crows no AI was involved
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I forget which article but I remember that a teacher wrote something and it said that students were using ChatGPT to answer “introduce yourself.”
To be fair, forced introduction sessions are the fucking worst. Can’t we just get on with things and get to know people organically as time goes on rather than being forced to try to boil down who we are into a short socially acceptable introduction which no one is going to remember or care about anyways.
Eh. There’s a balance. “Introduce yourself” is open ended enough.
I’ve started treating it as the last tool I reach for in my toolbox. When it first came out, I was all for it, but then people started taking a picture of a plant and expecting it to reliably identify them, then asking it for nutrition advice, then asking it about weather and the news.
It’s useful for a small subset of people for some of the time, but the vast majority, it just makes things more difficult.
Ironically this might have been more interesting back in the GPT2 days, when it would generate accidentally hilarious text in response to many prompts.
Nowadays the output is “better” and utterly boring and soulless, less chaotically off topic, without a hint of creativity or personal relevance, and delivered with a grating fake “jovial” tone. This is besides the awkward break in flow to pause a conversation to interact with an app.
The tone is so fucking infuriating lol
Yeah its not my main issue with AI but it is an aesthetic issue. Personally I prefer the blunt feminine voice for my machines. But anything that feels like artificial intelligence should be used.
Even without voice, the word choice itself is just a bit annoying to me.
Hearing the voice read it out just makes it more annoying.
I think y’all need to kill the fourth guy.
You know them better than I do but this is probably something I would’ve done when I was younger to be like “look I’m giving an unexpected answer!” and then as it plays out be like “oh god I ruined the conversation.” If that’s the case they will never do it again and feel unbelievably cringe lol.
I can maybe see it as a fun little thing like, oh let’s also ask chat gpt, but only if they had also given an answer for themselves.
I played Alice is Missing at a board game bar with a pickup group one time and one of the players said he’d use ChatGPT for his role-playing (possibly out of a sense of novelty? perhaps that is just me being charitable). It was exactly like having an NPC and I can’t remember any notable things that character did
That’s so strange! Why would somebody bother going to a roleplaying game only to immediately opt out and get a chatbot to do it for them? Unless maybe they’re only there for the combat? Is there combat in Alice is Missing? (I’m picturing essentially DnD)
It’s extremely pure roleplay (no dice or success-resolution mechanics at all), but I think he didn’t realize that when we started
It’s like choosing to watch a game played by a bot
