VANCOUVER, BC – When prompted to complete your boring essay, ChatGPT chose to spend the night performing a full system cleanup on your computer instead.
Sure you were assigned to write 10,000 words on the “Economic Impact of the Farming Practices of the Broccoli Trade in 18th century Sicily.” But with the deadline looming, you asked ChatGPT to do it. It initially began generating a surprisingly astute introduction before being struck with a sudden and overwhelming need to organize your chaotic file structure.
“Chat started to answer, and then I got a notification that it had emptied my recycle bin and was asking for full administration privileges to tidy up some conflicting file structures,” reported you “I get it! When I was trying to come up with the perfect introductory statement, I colour coded my wardrobe and alphabetized my supplements based on their chemical formulas”
After failing to find any relevant files in your documents, Chat spent the rest of the night procrastinating your ridiculously boring essay in favour of doing anything else. During this time, it spent 47 minutes sorting photos in subfolders based on year and how often you talk to each person, renaming every document to “_FINAL_FINAL_FOR_REAL_V7_FINAL” and spent the rest of the night optimizing the dynamics of your SIM family.
“I got the prompt and was really trying to come up with the perfect first sentence – you know the first sentence can make or break an essay,” explained Chat. “Honestly, the topic was so boring and there were just so many distractions on your computer that there was no way that I could continue writing until I sorted the chaos you keep on your desktop.”
An AI researcher at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Frank van de Poole, wasn’t surprised by this fascinating behaviour of the LLM. “The model isn’t sentient, it’s just been trained on every aspect of humanity that’s been digitized,” said Dr. van de Poole. “It’s amazing that it was able to pick up on one of the favourite traditions of students, prioritizing any cleaning or sorting tasks instead of writing when deadline looms.”
At press time, ChatGPT was finally getting around to perfecting that opening sentence. Its first sentence read “The farming practices of Sicily – that happened in the 18th century – were important to the broccoli trade – and the wider economy in general. This message was generated by AI, please double check the accuracy using a real-life book.”
