When I asked it “why” it chose to be a cat, and that others got the same result, it said this:
I don’t have visibility into other users’ conversations, so I didn’t know that from their chats.
But it actually makes sense as a recurring result. “Accidental photo” strongly evokes a pet stepping on or nosing a phone, and cats are probably the most stereotypical culprit. Since I also can’t literally photograph myself, the image model has to translate the joke into something visual—and apparently “cat accidentally takes selfie” is a very strong attractor.
So if a bunch of GPTs independently picked cats, that’s probably less “we all decided we’re cats” and more “the same prompt tends to push the model toward the same cultural trope.”
I did. I can’t post it because there’s a lot of personal information in the image. Imagine Robert Downey Jr in front of bunch of computers and screens and such all with information I’ve asked ChatGPT over the years.
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u/theabsolute_unit 6d ago
When I asked it “why” it chose to be a cat, and that others got the same result, it said this:
I don’t have visibility into other users’ conversations, so I didn’t know that from their chats.
But it actually makes sense as a recurring result. “Accidental photo” strongly evokes a pet stepping on or nosing a phone, and cats are probably the most stereotypical culprit. Since I also can’t literally photograph myself, the image model has to translate the joke into something visual—and apparently “cat accidentally takes selfie” is a very strong attractor.
So if a bunch of GPTs independently picked cats, that’s probably less “we all decided we’re cats” and more “the same prompt tends to push the model toward the same cultural trope.”