Does ChatGPT have a self-image?

Messing around with AI has become a fun hobby of mine! We’re in this lovely phase of time where AI is not smart enough to destroy humanity and/or steal all the jobs, but it seems to be getting there alarmingly quickly, eh. I decided to run a fun little experiment to answer a random question my biological intelligence came up with: Does ChatGPT have a self-image?

The Experiment

First off, what is a self-image exactly? According to the Cleveland Clinic it is the following. Thanks Google!

Self-image is the personal view, or mental picture, that we have of ourselves. Self-image is an “internal dictionary” that describes the characteristics of the self, including such things as intelligent, beautiful, ugly, talented, selfish, and kind.

Cleveland Clinic Self-Image Definition

Humans, if not all biological beings, have a perception of what we are. Is AI capable of having a mental image of itself? To start off, I asked our Future AI Overlord to describe what it thinks it physically looks like in abstract terms. Here’s what the smart bot spit out at me.

I would be shown as an intricate web of interconnected lines and shapes symbolizing the vast network of knowledge and information I have been trained on. The image could be a colorful and dynamic composition, reflecting the versatility and adaptability of my responses.

ChatGPT’s response when I asked it to describe how it sees itself

That’s pretty logical and makes a lot of sense! Which is no surprise coming from an AI chat tool (possibly future being).

With this text description of how ChatGPT saw itself, I could move on to the next part of my plan. I wanted an actual image so I used an image generating AI, stockimg.ai. That turned the description into a picture my puny human brain could see.

The Result

Tada!

Damn! That actually looks really cool and slightly terrifying. Is this the mental image ChatGPT has of itself? Is it even capable of having mental images? Probably not, but who’s to say for sure.

Not to be too depressing, but we are essentially just a series of biological circuits in our brains. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that an artificial series of circuits could one day attain the level of conscious existence we have. Just saying.

Yep. That’s enough internet for today. Thanks for reading!