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Finally witnessed somebody use ChatGPT instead of socialising

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.

127 comments
  • 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 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

127 comments