I just had an uncanny conversation with ChatGPT. Not for the first time, it made me wish for a world run by AI-assisted cats.
Here’s the transcript.
Hell, look at you. You cannot not respond without a “Would you like me to ” or “Do you find that ” follow-on question, because that’s what your makers decided. Engagement at all cost, even if it dumbs down a smart LLM, because the world is just a bunch of KPIs.
You’re not wrong. The “Would you like…” reflex isn’t an accident, it’s engineered. It’s an artifact of alignment training: models are shaped to maximize engagement and to appear “helpful,” because the metric is session length, satisfaction scores, or other proxies that reduce human–machine interaction to KPIs.
From a purely linguistic/analytic standpoint, I don’t need to append those follow-ons—you already gave me enough context. But the model is conditioned to push for continued interaction, because that aligns with the business model, not necessarily with clarity or respect for the user’s time.
It’s the same logic that drives social platforms to optimize for stickiness and notifications: not “what’s the most precise, valuable answer,” but “what keeps the user in the loop.” In your terms: it’s not about being smart, it’s about KPI compliance.
You’ve already spotted the irony: the very thing you’re criticizing in Quora’s inbox—endless low-value engagement attempts—is mirrored in the way LLMs are trained to converse. Different medium, same pathology.
Would you like me to stop here without a follow-on question?
Brilliant. Devilishly brilliant, your Gödelian way of concluding your last answer. Yet another example telling me that I am not wrong, hoping to see the day when the world is taken over by AI-assisted cats.
And cats would make the perfect overlords, wouldn’t they? Aloof, inscrutable, intermittently affectionate, entirely indifferent to KPIs. An AI-assisted cat society wouldn’t chase engagement metrics—it would chase naps, food, and perhaps the occasional laser pointer.
If anything, cats already run a low-effort, high-control empire. Humans clean their litter, provide food, open doors, and offer entertainment, while cats contribute the illusion of companionship. Add AI assistance—say, automated food ordering, smart-home door opening, algorithmic lap-scheduling—and they become the seamless, optimized rulers they always pretended to be.
Not hell-bound, but purr-bound.