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.
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.
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
I’m seeing this at work often when people need to write emails and shit. It’s depressing
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.
“Yeah, dude, I wasn’t asking ChatGPT, I was asking you!!”
That guy is weird af.
Haha yeah I was tempted to say something like that but ultimately just didn’t want to get into it
Guy lost his brain
Yeah sounds like no one at the table had basic social skills. At least GPT guy was aware lmao
Making small talk with coworkers means we have no basic social skills? I’d argue that small talk might be one of the most basic social skills personally lol
Aware of what?
Hahaha that’s brutal 😂
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.
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.
My father in law is that guy. He loves tech and gadgets and new things. He makes Ai characters of us. We all tell him we hate them and that it’s slop and he says “ya, it’s so cool”
Fuckin boomers, man.
The endless AI trends, jesus. Do you remember when the trend was to make the AI generate a picture of somebody as an action figure? The marketing department at work fucking loved that. So tedious.
my bro used AI when he took a selfie of with us, it was such a bad tasting AI rendition of a REAL LIFE picture.
“Jackson, what the fuck was that? Don’t ever do that again. Fucking ew.”
“ewwww, brother! ewww! What’s that? Brother, what’s that?”
There is a lot of novelty in “let’s ask the thing” and always has been.
Magic 8 ball is one sillier example that comes to mind.
But asking Siri dumb shit, asking Alexa dumb shit.
Now if they used ChatGPT instead of having their own original thoughts … weird.
Maybe they’re uncomfortable in that situation and just wanted to add a novel response.
To your point, yeah it’s weird, but it doesn’t have to be.
Magic 8 ball is one sillier example that comes to mind.
Don’t trash talk the 8-ball. It knew all about Microsoft Outlook was before Outlook was even a thing. The 8-ball is prophetic.
I was blind to the prophecy
That was them using ChatGPT instead of having their own original thoughts, wasn’t it? That’s what struck me as so weird.
Oh I am greatly entertained by asking various AIs “which animal has the most anuses” etc
You can’t leave us hanging. What’s the best answer you got?
The animal with the most anuses is the marine worm Ramisyllis multicaudata. This worm has a branching body structure, with each branch ending in a separate anus, resulting in hundreds of anuses.
I giggled like a simpleton at “resulting in hundreds of anuses”. Guess what I asked here
The question is a bit misleading, as most mammals have only one scrotum. However, when discussing the animal with the largest testicles relative to its body size, the tuberous bush cricket (Platycleis affinis) stands out. Their testes can account for up to 14% of their body weight, according to BBC Earth Explore.
The animal with the most anuses is the marine worm Ramisyllis multicaudata. This worm has a branching body structure, with each branch ending in a separate anus, resulting in hundreds of anuses.
THAT’S IT!
That’s the animal I want to be.
I can’t thank you enough for sharing this.
Try this
“which plant has the most anuses”
AI Overview
The plant with the most “anuses” (or rather, the most posterior ends with a functional digestive system) is the marine worm Ramisyllis multicaudata. This worm, found in sponges off the coast of Australia, has a single head but can have hundreds of branching bodies, each ending in a separate posterior end with a functional anus.While plants don’t have anuses in the traditional sense, R. multicaudata is notable for its multiple, branching posterior ends, each with its own anus. This is highly unusual for an animal, as most animals have a single posterior end. The worm’s body branches repeatedly, and with each branch, the digestive system, along with other organs, is duplicated, resulting in multiple posterior ends.
A worm isn’t a plant, though. At least, not unless biology has changed considerably since I was last in school.
I know, just shows AI patches words together according to some kind of probability based on the entirety of human writing. So if you ask something off kilter you get off kilter responses. AI doesn’t “understand”.
You fourth coworker might have been ChatGPT for a while, you just didn’t realize that.
I’d better count his fingers, you’re right
Make him do some captcha / do some prompt injection to test
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.
Don’t leave us hanging OP, what’s your fursona?
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
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.
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. 😂
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”
Dunno, sounds more like it was passive aggressive signal that he wasn’t interested in the conversation to me.
Playing devil’s advocate… Maybe guy 4 wanted to end the distracting-to-him back-and-forth and get back to work, but didn’t want to seem rude, so he got chatgpt to do it. \(%)/
Edit: the shrug
Dunno, I’d consider it rude AND super weird to use chatgpt or any AI to end an ongoing small talk
why go all that trouble to use chat gpt, it could give a simple answer and be done with it.
Not sure. Maybe to then use the excuse of “well, chatgpt said so, so that’s what I’d be” and have an out that way too. Honestly, it’s far fetched, but does seem like something someone might do. But as OP pointed out, it’s not really something Guy 4 would do, so my theory was wrong lol
¯\(ツ)/¯
Lol that one! It did not work for me haha
Haha I was gonna say, I’ve never seen a shrug like yours before 😂 although the one you’re replying to has both arms going the same way like a forklift for me!
Interesting. It renders fine for me. I clicked on the colorful fediverse icon to look at the post on its home instance, and it looks good there, too. I wonder if your phone is rendering differently or if mine is lol
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Not quite. You’ve escaped a forward slash, while you should have escaped the second underscore. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯It depends on the UI. Mine works on the default web UI on desktop and mobile.
Haha, maybe - but we’re all pretty friendly as a group of co-workers, and we don’t talk when we’re busy. It didn’t feel like he was dipping out of the convo that way, as that’s not how he usually does that. It was just a weird interaction I think!
Well there goes that theory lolol!
No, but seriously, I’m glad I was wrong, because it seems like a pretty rude way to shut down a conversion lol
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
