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\n Illustration: Mar\u00eda Jes\u00fas Contreras\n <\/p>\n
Recently, Betty, a Wisconsin art-school student who works at a local escape room, monitored a group of 20-somethings as they made their way through a spy-themed experience. About three-quarters of the way in, the players were stumped. They stood in front of a painting, magnet in hand. To solve the final puzzle and escape, they had to look behind the painting, where they\u2019d find a diagram that would lead them to a nearby locker, which they could unlock using the magnet. One of the players \u201cpulled out her phone,\u201d Betty recalls, \u201cand was like, \u2018I\u2019m just gonna ask ChatGPT how to do this.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The rest of the team was unfazed. Are you serious? Betty thought. \u201cIt\u2019s over $100 for a group that big. So you\u2019re spending a lot of money to go to this place where the entire point of going there is to try doing these things on your own.\u201d It\u2019s Betty\u2019s job to offer clues that help players through the game, and unlike ChatGPT, she\u2019s seen the room with her own eyes. The group \u201cwas asking it what to do with the magnet, which is really weird because you\u2019d think you\u2019d be able to deduce that,\u201d Betty continued. Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT\u2019s response proved useless \u2014 the team didn\u2019t end up escaping in time.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one thing to use ChatGPT to cheat at things you\u2019d rather not do: homework, work-work. Or when it involves a reward like a good grade or a cash prize. But to cheat your way through leisure activities, especially ones you pay to do? As one TikTok user puts it, \u201cIt\u2019s like going into a corn maze and just wanting a straight line to the end.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just as the word clanker now serves as a slur for chatbots and agentic AI, a new lexicon \u2014 including secondhand thinkers, ChatNPC, sloppers, and botlickers \u2014 is being workshopped by people online to describe the kind of ChatGPT user who seems hopelessly dependent on the mediocre platform. Online, people aren\u2019t mincing words when it comes to expressing their disdain for and irritation with \u201cthose types of people,\u201d as Betty describes them. Escape-room employees have crowded around several viral tweets and TikToks to share stories of ChatGPT\u2019s invasion. \u201cSo many groups of teens try to sneakily pull out their phones and ask ChatGPT how to grasp the concept of puzzles, then get mad when I tell them to use their brains and the actual person who can help them,\u201d reads one comment. On X, same energy: \u201cUsing ChatGPT to aid you through an escape room is bonkers bozo loser killjoy dumdum shitass insanity.\u201d<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s not just escape rooms. ChatGPT is being used to enshittify fun in all sorts of places. It\u2019s used at trivia nights (\u201cJust went to a nightmare trivia night where i lost because the questions were generated by chatgpt,\u201d wrote one X user; \u201cchatgpt at trivia should be a deadly sin,\u201d said another). It\u2019s writing flirty messages and \u201cGood morning\u201d texts full of em dashes. It\u2019s even sapping the joy from snarky internet lurking: As one X user lamented, obviously written-by-AI Instagram captions are ruining the distinct pleasure of close-reading someone\u2019s post. Or, more succinctly put, \u201cShow me your run-on sentence you stupid bitch!\u201d<\/p>\n
The latest and most comprehensive study in ChatGPT usage, published by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that nonwork messages make up approximately 70 percent of all consumer messages. The study\u2019s \u201cprivacy-preserving analysis of 1.5 million conversations\u201d also found that most users value ChatGPT \u201cas an adviser,\u201d like a pocket librarian and portable therapist, as opposed to an assistant. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that ChatGPT does not consistently deliver reliable facts, people now seem more likely to use it to come up with recipes, write personal messages, and figure out what to stream than to consult it in higher-stakes situations involving work and money.<\/p>\n
David, 40, who lives in Florida and works in sales, uses ChatGPT as a book-club substitute, an interlocutor that scrapes the internet for stimulating opinions and perspectives and aggregates them. But it can be the worst kind of book clubber, too, as David found when he was making his way through The Wandering Inn, a 15 million word fantasy epic that claims to be the longest book series ever written, and turned to ChatGPT to discuss how much he was enjoying a particular character. ChatGPT, of course, agreed: \u201c\u2009\u2018Yeah, he\u2019s fantastic. That\u2019s why it makes it so much worse when he dies,\u2019\u201d David recalls it saying. \u201cI was like, \u2018What do you mean when he dies?!\u2019\u201d ChatGPT had spoiled a character death that didn\u2019t occur until three books later.<\/p>\n
But the spoiler hasn\u2019t deterred David \u2014 instead, he now leads these exchanges with a disclaimer stating where he is in a series. \u201cI still like having someone to discuss the books with,\u201d he says. \u201cIdeally, would I love to have a human with me? Sure.\u201d Even David, though, would draw the line at cheating in an escape room.<\/p>\n
For crocheter Eric, AI has encroached on the community formed around his hobby. A member of Reddit\u2019s r\/crochet, he\u2019s watched the group spiral into the depths of AI paranoia as images of phony crochet projects and impossible-to-execute patterns flooded the feed. \u201cBefore the AI pictures came around,\u201d Eric says, \u201cit was a super-chill community where anyone could ask literally any question and there were 15 people there to help you.\u201d He now finds himself second-guessing whether any decent crochet pattern he\u2019s seeing is real \u2014 like a book of Dungeons & Dragons\u2013themed patterns he was initially excited about. He took a closer look at the cover \u2014 the stitches of the owl-faced creature and treasure chest, the lines on the wooden table they sat on, and the contours of the props that flanked them \u2014 checking for the telltale smooth textures or subtle glitches that might suggest it was AI-generated. He couldn\u2019t trust his own eyes, so he asked for a second opinion on the sub-Reddit. \u201cI got a lot of hate for it,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople were mad.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not just because the consensus was that it was, in fact, not AI; the Redditors were simply tired of playing detective more than they were upvoting each other\u2019s stitches. It wasn\u2019t long before the moderators attempted to impose a moratorium on the AI talk, \u201ca topic that has been discussed to the point of being excessive.\u201d<\/p>\n
AI technologies initially elbowed their way into all the obvious places \u2014 customer service, e-commerce, productivity software \u2014 to unsatisfying results. Earlier this year, findings from MIT Media Lab\u2019s Project NANDA said that 95 percent of the companies that invested in generative AI to boost earnings and productivity have zero gains to show for it. Turns out that AI is very bad at most jobs, and this pivot to leisure is likely indicative of the industry\u2019s mounting desperation: Any hope of an \u201cIntelligence Age\u201d that would see the cure for cancer and the end of climate change is seeming less likely, given AI\u2019s toll on the environment. And now that it has failed to \u201coutperform humans at most economically valuable work,\u201d contrary to the hopes of the OpenAI Charter back in 2018, these companies are happy to settle for making us dependent on the products in our leisure time.<\/p>\n
After years of vowing to stay away from pornography, OpenAI just changed its policy and announced updates that would let adults use ChatGPT to produce erotica. Elon Musk\u2019s Grok chatbot also introduced new features that enabled it to be used as a hardcore-porn generator. And like any other imperiled media business, Meta and OpenAI recently announced they\u2019re pivoting to video. Crafts, trivia nights, escape rooms, art, literature, shitposting, porn \u2014 AI companies are looking to get a cut of the action. When will we stop letting ChatGPT have all the fun?<\/p>\n
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