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.
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!