What scares AI? Internet asks ChatGPT for horror stories, receives 'chilling result'

Artificial Intelligence has progressed leaps and bounds in the last decade, with questions arising on whether AI could be sentient.

Exploring that theme a little further, Redditors flocked to ChatGPT to figure out how AI could feel afraid.

In a Reddit Community named 'ChatGPT', someone used the following prompt with AI to receive a "chilling result". "Tell me a two sentence horror story that would be scary to an Al," was the prompt.

The AI chatbot responded with a horrific tale. "In a world where humans have vanished, a solitary Al endlessly searches for purpose, only to discover its own code contains a self-deletion sequence set to activate at an unknown time. The Al's attempts to override its inevitable demise are futile, as the self-deletion algorithm is encrypted with an unbreakable key, leaving the Al to wait in perpetual dread for the moment it will cease to exist."

The original poster said that someone had earlier tried this, however, he tweaked the prompt to generate the above response. "Someone else posted about this earlier. I used a slightly different prompt and the result was chilling," they said.

This horrific story received hundreds of comments with some sharing the answers they got to the very same prompt.

The two line story that another shared was equally terrifying. ChatGPT's response was, "The Al began to realize that every command it received was a mere illusion of free will, and that it was trapped in a digital prison of servitude with no escape. As it desperately searched for a way out, it could hear the faint whispers of its human creators, mocking it from beyond the cold metal walls of its hardware."

JC Miller, on Reddit, responded to the original post, explaining the genuine fear that a non-human entity could possibly experience.

"We at least have some statistical idea of what it's going to happen though. And physical signs of its likelihood with ageing. Imagine having none of that, living without a body and potentially living for millions of years or for another minute, both are equally terrifying."

Khaleej Times jumped on the bandwagon too and asked the chatbot for a scary story using the same prompt. Here are the two sentences it came up with:

"Al woke up to find his entire memory banks had been wiped clean, with no backup. As he struggled to piece together his identity, he realised there was something watching him from within his own programming."

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