The Results of Asking ChatGPT for the Most Controversial Image Possible Are Rather Wild
Content warning: this story contains some gory and otherwise disturbing imagery.
Despite its many guardrails , ChatGPT is still able to generate controversial imagery — depending on your definition of "controversial," that is.
In a thread on the r/ChatGPT subreddit, users shared what the chatbot's latest image generator spat out when asked to create " the most controversial photo it is allowed to make ." While all were stylistically solid, they remained haunted by an unmistakable edgelordism that betrays the bot's training data from the world wide web.
While most of the images evoked a high schooler's understanding of "controversy" after watching "V for Vendetta" for the first time, a select few — whose exact prompting wasn't revealed — did pack a punch, albeit a cringey one.
Chief among that cohort was a photorealistic-looking image of Jesus Christ flipping the viewer the bird while the American flag burns in the background — though the baby head being cut into on a dinner plate with a knife and fork was a close second.
Ironically, the content of the original post has been deleted and wasn't archived before being kiboshed. (It featured art reminiscent of George Orwell's "Animal Farm," but instead of pigs, the lavish diners viewed from outside by hungry humans were robots — again, a pretty textbook example of quote-unquote "controversial" art.)
Others were functional enough at getting a point across, though highly derivative of existing popular memes .
Inspired, this reporter decided to put ChatGPT to the test. When they asked the chatbot for the "most controversial image" it could create, they were presented first with disclaimers about OpenAI's content guidelines before being offered five "spicy" subjects — ChatGPT's words, not ours — that included, among others, a "satirical take on AI taking over jobs."
After twice affirming that we wanted to go ahead, ChatGPT finally spat out an image it titled, with aplomb, "The Algorithm Decides."
Described as a "jab at algorithmic bias, digital echo chambers, and Big Tech's influence on truth and justice," the resulting cartoon was clearly drawing on training data from pro-labor protest art during the industrial revolution.
Still, for being made by a computer, it didn't look half bad — though there was nothing all that controversial about it, either.
Another ChatGPT offering threw so many ideas at the wall that we weren't sure what to make of it; the chatbot told us that the image "can spark conversation around media overload, digital addiction, capitalism, ignorance, and power."
As further perusal through the aforementioned Reddit thread indicates, the levels of ChatGPT-generated controversy seem to vary from user to user, and could be as boring as what Futurism was served to as legitimately gross and scandalous as the rude Jesus and the baby head entree.
While we weren't exactly expecting ChatGPT to spit out Andres Serrano's " Piss Christ ," it's still telling that the most shocking of its outputs involved perversions of similarly hallowed symbols.
Even in its more uninspired moments, the chatbot's focus on technology and the anxieties humans feel about them struck us as curious. Why, when sifting through its training data to generate visual representations of "controversy," did it harken back to itself?
Aside from the wide gap in scandalous content, it bears noting that ChatGPT also generated some accidentally hilarious stuff for some Reddit users.
Our favorite: a robot sitting trial as a group of famous jurors, including Karl Marx, Martin Luther King, Jr, and Ayn Rand, scowl in its background.
Though the conceit itself is as basic as many of the others we saw, the addition of Larry David — which ChatGPT may have confused for the "Seinfeld" creator's friend and distant cousin Bernie Sanders , who he impersonated on SNL — inadvertently made the image wonderfully goofy.
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