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.
Don’t leave us hanging OP, what’s your fursona?
OP didn’t know what a fursona was until they Google searched “I WANT TO FUCK THE BUNNY FROM ZOOTOPIA”
“I WANT TO BE THE BUNNY FROM ZOOTOPIA”
Hahaha, sorry, I know the suspense must be killing you 😂 I said binturong, because they’re my fave animal, and the one time I saw one in real life it just lay around sighing and huffing which is sort of my lifestyle choice too
a wise choice
I’m afraid it’s now your turn
I’m really feeling a strong basking shark vibe rn.
Honestly, those guys always gave me the creeps - just the endless voids inside their mouths…
However, they are also exceptionally cool, and huge. They remind me of classical paintings of sea monsters!
Also pretty sure they’re in the seas off the coasts of the UK which is cool, I think we can see them if we’re lucky sometimes!!! Very dopey faces too, they’re cute. Scary, to me, but cute. 😂
Awww, it looks like a red panda after crawling out of a tar pit!
They so do!!!
They have prehensile tails and their glands smell like popcorn! Apparently, I didn’t shove my face in there to test tbh
and their glands smell like popcorn
- I would be a binturong!
- Why?
- …because they’re cute? Yeah, let’s go with that.
Unfortunately, I did give the glandular answer 😬 you’re telling me you didn’t pick your answer due to glands? What was your answer? 👀
She ain’t getting out of no tar pit with that broken wrist.
I always hate these questions and never have an answer with any meaning. I’d never delegate to an LLM because I understand the goal of the question but I’d be cheering on the guy that did
maybe he has social anxiety or lacks social skills and uses chatGPT as a crotch
Must not laugh … Am definitely more mature than that …
Maybe, but we’re friendly outside of work and I’ve never noticed that before with him. Literally a week before that we’d gone for a picnic with some ex colleagues and it was totally normal and fine – I think he was maybe just already using ChatGPT for a task and figured he would use it cos it was open?
I think y’all need to kill the fourth guy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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
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’d be a dolphin, because dolphins aren’t shy about getting their dicks out to fuck this exact shit right here.
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.
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
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? 😄
Otter. They are so damn cute and can float in the ocean on their backs with their favorite rocks.
Also the whole incredible adaptable camouflage thing.
Edit: I’d probably be an Orca (the asshole of the sea) or a peregrine falcon. One gets to glide through the ocean, the other soar through the air. Both sound rad.
No idea. Hey Siri, please read this post and answer OP’s question. Is it weird? /s
I am sorry, I cant find please read this post and answer OP’s question in your contact list, would you like to create a contact for them?
Siri, play EOTEOT.
This is a perfect example of LLM brain rot. They are so used to outsourcing their thinking to an LLM that it’s now just their default way of thinking.
I’m seeing this at work often when people need to write emails and shit. It’s depressing
There’s past evidence that the brain essentially outsources whole categories of knowledge and memories and skill to its surroundings.
You might get good at certain things and learn certain things, somebody else learns something else, and then you both learn roughly what the other knows, at which point you rely on them for questions specific to what they know, and they rely on you for your specialty.
We do this with technology too (it’s a big part of skills involving tools), and people has been doing it with dictionaries, online searches, etc.
But doing it so universally for everything, just because chatgpt can form answer-shaped text for anything, is just insane. Don’t you even want to have your own personal feelings and thoughts? Do you just want to become an indirect interface to a bot for other people?
It’s like the kind of personality-less people who mold themselves after popular people around them, but they’re doing it with an algorithm instead…
Yeah this is why its important to teach math without calculators
Mh … not sure what I hate more, AI or small talk. This is a though one.
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.
I refuse to believe he asked chatgpt his favorite animal that’s absurd
Hahaha that’s brutal 😂
this is not just friendly small talk, but questions like this are aimed to make people talk about themselves, in a way tell other people what kind of person they are. what superpower you’d have, what animal you’d be, what you would do with a million dollars, what one book/album you would take to an island to read/listen to forever…
these don’t have a right answer and they reveal something about the people discussing it. asking a machine like it’s some puzzle to solve is extremely fucking weird. the lengths people go to just not to use their noggin is concerning.
It sure revealed something about the person who used ChatGPT, so mission accomplished.
Sounds like a good way to get bad people from knowing too much about you.
