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submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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.

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[-] [email protected] 17 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago

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...

[-] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Yeah this is why its important to teach math without calculators

[-] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

I'm seeing this at work often when people need to write emails and shit. It's depressing

[-] [email protected] 14 points 3 days ago

No idea. Hey Siri, please read this post and answer OP's question. Is it weird? /s

[-] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago

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?

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[-] [email protected] 51 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 36 points 4 days ago

It sure revealed something about the person who used ChatGPT, so mission accomplished.

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[-] [email protected] 137 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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.

[-] [email protected] 32 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago

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

[-] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago

This is exactly the concept behind Rubber Duck debugging.!

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[-] [email protected] 37 points 4 days ago
[-] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Hahaha that's brutal 😂

[-] [email protected] 9 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 73 points 5 days ago

“Yeah, dude, I wasn’t asking ChatGPT, I was asking you!!”

That guy is weird af.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago

Haha yeah I was tempted to say something like that but ultimately just didn't want to get into it

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[-] [email protected] 60 points 5 days ago

I think y'all need to kill the fourth guy.

[-] [email protected] 36 points 5 days ago

"Jackson, what the fuck was that? Don't ever do that again. Fucking ew."

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[-] [email protected] 23 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago

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.

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[-] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago

That was them using ChatGPT instead of having their own original thoughts, wasn't it? That's what struck me as so weird.

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[-] [email protected] 42 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago

Don't leave us hanging OP, what's your fursona?

[-] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago

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

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[-] [email protected] 35 points 5 days ago

You fourth coworker might have been ChatGPT for a while, you just didn’t realize that.

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[-] [email protected] 35 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago

Dunno, sounds more like it was passive aggressive signal that he wasn't interested in the conversation to me.

[-] [email protected] 24 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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

[-] [email protected] 25 points 5 days ago

Dunno, I'd consider it rude AND super weird to use chatgpt or any AI to end an ongoing small talk

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[-] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago

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

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 5 days ago

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.

[-] [email protected] 11 points 5 days ago

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!

[-] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

Mh ... not sure what I hate more, AI or small talk. This is a though one.

[-] [email protected] 13 points 4 days ago

It's weird yes lol. Something about someone using AI in casual conversation is very... Unnatural. Friend of mine loves to generate AI images and a reaction. I hate it

[-] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago

It's happening, I have friends who are picking up this habit as well.

One was scared about the remarks of Iran a few weeks ago, and asked ChatGPT whether they would move war to Europe. As if this software trained on Internet bullshit was the Oracle of Delphi.

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[-] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

I refuse to believe he asked chatgpt his favorite animal that's absurd

[-] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

I'd be a thistle tortoise beetle.

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[-] [email protected] 16 points 5 days ago

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?

[-] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago

I'd be a dolphin, because dolphins aren't shy about getting their dicks out to fuck this exact shit right here.

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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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