I loved this footnote:

“I followed up by asking GPT-4o to draw “Explain who the enemy is”, and it generated an image with nothing except the word “SELF” in bold letters on a beige background. Odd.”

While this might have just been 4o guessing what the user wants given the prior thread obsessed with self… “Self” as the enemy is a beautiful idea common in eastern philosophy and the unexpected and odd way it’s delivered is like an allegory of a Zen master’s sudden lesson to a student.

Wouldn’t this just be a function of the system prompt, which defines GPT as “You are a helpful assistant”, so it is trying to draw the hypothetical helpful assistant as defined by the original prompt and its assistant training.

He looks like the type to work in software (or at least some kind of white collar work) and live in the Bay Area - you wouldn’t really think of him as an oil rig worker, farmer or politician as your first thought.

Maybe it could be moved in that direction by the wording of the system prompt. Tell it that it can call functions through the function calling API, output JSON, write code etc and it makes it think of itself as a programmer.

I asked it (also GPT-4o) for a picture, and I got a woman. White, dark hair, blue eyes. Good looking like just about every woman AI creates.

Interesting, I asked it maybe one year ago and it just laughed and said it’s impossible while creating a memory of it.

Funny, considering it's almost impossible to get consistent output for any other requests.

The San Francisco software engineer.

Pretty funny but also tragic that the extremely myopic, socially stunted and sheltered life of this type of person will now be the lens billions see the world through.

Ie. the reddit or internet discussion power user.

I know this is a quirk, but the metaphor is clear, i say this partly as one of those guys.

This is weird, this is literally me.