“I’ve reached the limit of how silly I can make the goose using the tools available.”
Silliest Goose
What if there was a puppy so happy that its grin could span entire galaxies? What if there was a goose that was so silly that it sprouted a third, transdimensional eye?
Thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which got an update late last year that allows it to generate detailed images, we don’t have to wonder any longer.
“For every 10 likes this gets, I will ask ChatGPT to make this goose a little sillier,” robotics company CEO Garrett Scott McCurrach tweeted in November. It didn’t take long for the goose to become eye-poppingly weird, going from a photorealistic take of a bog-standard waterbird to a cartoonish deity that sparkled with rainbow colors.
Several iterations into his experiment, McCurrach finally hit a wall.
“I’ve reached the limit of how silly I can make the goose using the tools available,” ChatGPT answered, sounding vaguely exasperated.
Once McCurrach managed to goad it into imagining an even sillier goose, the tool complained that it had finally reached the “zenith of silliness.”
Final Frontier
The experiment has turned into a huge meme, with plenty of other social media users mimicking it over the months, like a chess pawn taking on a higher consciousness or a puppy that’s so cute that it transcends its Earthly form entirely to melt into a psychedelic swirl of colors.
These interactions may seem like not much more than a meaningless distraction. Nonetheless, they have some interesting takeaways. For one, each experiment showcases the ease with which users can interact with AI image generators.
“I think that’s a really good example of where AI is going,” McCurrach told the New York Times. “We can be a lot more vague; we can give it more of a vibe than a concrete idea. Then it can go and make the assumptions to get where it needs.”
To McCurrach, it’s not surprising that most of these experiments end up in a brain-melting depiction of a spaceborne monster.
“Look at Marvel movies,” he added. “They eventually got to outer space and time travel as the final frontiers of creativity.”
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