Holy cow, ChatGPT can create words for emotions we never knew we had
The rapid advance in AI tools has provoked much existential and ontological debate. Can AI really think and create or does it just churn out pastiches of all previous human ideas?
Now it seems that AI has a grasp of human emotions. A Reddit user asked Chat GPT to invent 10 new emotions, each with a name and potential cause, and he made images to represent them using one of the best AI art generators. The results suggest ChatGPT might know us better than we know ourselves.
Writing on Reddit, the user u/Philipp says he gave ChatGPT the prompt: "Please come up with 10 new emotions. Include their name, and what may lead to them. You may exaggerate and take creative freedoms." Once he had the results, he created an image for each one using Midjourney and "lots of Photoshop", including the new Photoshop Generative Fill tool.
The 'new emotions' that ChatGPT came up with include lostaliga, quirksolation, neurothirst, epicgrief, erogret, charmelancholy and globanxiety. Now, I thought lostalgia was already an official dictionary work referring to a wistful pining for the hazy days of the first seasons of Lost before it became clear the series' writers were making it up as they went along. But the other words do appear to be entirely original, with no Google results.
Epicgrief is described as the profound sadness felt when finishing a beloved book or series, and quirksolation is the "secret amusement or pride one feels from acknowledging their own quirky traits when they're alone."
So is ChatGPT able to actually create language to describe human emotions we never knew he had? Some aren't so sure. It's easy to spot a pattern here. All of the AI bot's new emotions are simple portmanteaus that combine two existing words in the way that we create new compounds all the time. It seems it knows us well enough to know how new words can be created.
Either way, people are impressed at how relatable some of the concepts are. "Epicgrief, I feel like I’ve been seen," one person wrote on Reddit. Others have begun suggesting their own new words, including 'Reddret': when you regret making a post on the platform that you thought would get more likes than it did.
Exploring AI art? See our pick of the best AI art tutorials for pointers.
