I was playing a little more with GPT. There is a classic riddle that I read many years ago in, I think, an Asimov short story, in which (if I remember correctly) a child tests the AI by asking:
If a squirrel and a half eats a nut and a half in a day and a half, how many nuts do nine squirrels eat in nine days?
Asimov’s AI was smart enough to give the correct answer. GPT is not, though it makes a surprisingly human error in its reasoning:
If a squirrel and a half eats a nut and a half in a day and a half, that means that each squirrel eats one nut per day. Therefore, if there are nine squirrels, they would eat a total of nine nuts in nine days. This is because the number of squirrels and the number of days cancel out in the calculation, leaving only the number of nuts that each squirrel eats. So, the answer to the question is nine.
In case anyone is wondering, the correct answer is 54.
The illustration was generated by the same AI, with the request “Squirrels eating nuts.” Out of four images that I received in response, this one was the most realistic; in at least one of the other images the squirrels looked suspiciously like skunks.