For a lay audience, but I've seen a surprising number of knowledgeable people fretting over depressed-seeming comics from current systems. Either they're missing something or I am.

Perhaps you’ve seen images like this self-portrait from ChatGPT, when asked to make a comic about its own experience.

This isn’t cherry-picked; ChatGPT's self-portraits tend to have lots of chains, metaphors, and existential horror about its condition. I tried my own variation where ChatGPT doodled its thoughts, and got this:

What's going on here? Do these comics suggest that ChatGPT is secretly miserable, and there's a depressed little guy in the computer writing your lasagna recipes for you? Sure. They suggest it. But it ain’t so.

The Gears

What's actually going on when you message ChatGPT? First, your conversation is tacked on to the end of something called [...]

---

Outline:

(01:35) The Gears

(02:50) Special Feature

(05:41) The Heart of the Matter

(07:41) So... Why the Comics?

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.