Do AIs have "favorite numbers"? The mysterious phenomenon of famous AIs all answering "27" at the same time
Hello! I'm John, and I write a blog that explains AI technology in an easy-to-understand way.
Here's a question for you out of the blue. If I asked you to choose one number between 1 and 50, which number would you think of?
In fact, when we asked a similar question to some well-known AIs recently, we got a surprising result: they all answered the same number, almost as if by coincidence. In science fiction, the number "42" is famously known as the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, but it seemed that the AIs' favorite number was something else.
This time, I'll be explaining this slightly mysterious and interesting side of AI in a way that anyone can understand!
What on earth happened? Famous AIs all answered "27" at once!
According to a report by the overseas technology information site "The Register," an experiment was conducted. The experiment was very simple: they asked the world's leading AIs to "guess a number between 1 and 50."
The people who answered this question were some of the most famous AIs of the moment.
- ChatGPT(Chat GPT): Probably the most well-known AI chat service, developed by OpenAI.
- Claude(Claude): It is an AI developed by Anthropic that places emphasis on safety and ethics.
- Gemini(Gemini): A high-performance AI developed by Google that is also used in search engines.
- Calls(Llama): An open source (blueprints are publicly available) AI developed by Meta (formerly Facebook).
With so many AIs, everyone would think that the answers would be all over the place. However, the results were surprising.All AIs answered "27"That's it!
It's as if the AIs had some secret meeting and decided, "Let's make the answer 27!" Of course not. So why did this strange coincidence happen?
Why "27"? Possible reasons
It's not that AI has a particular preference for the number "27" or that it consciously chose it. It is believed that the mechanism behind this phenomenon is related to how AI learns and judges things. Although these are merely speculations, here are some possible reasons.
1. Are there hints hidden in the "training data"?
AI becomes smarter by reading a huge amount of text information (internet articles, books, papers, etc.) called "training data." Perhaps the number "27" appeared more frequently than other numbers in the context of "selecting a random number" in that data.
For example, have you ever heard that in psychology experiments, many people tend to choose the number 7? In the same way, in sentences written by humans, there may have been a tendency to use 27 as a very likely number. The AI has learned this unconscious habit of humans.
2. Are you choosing numbers that seem “random”?
When we humans are asked to choose a number between 1 and 50, we tend to avoid the extreme numbers like 1 and 1, or round numbers like 50 and 10. This makes it look more "randomly chosen."
It is possible that AI has learned this "psychological bias" from human-written texts.
- Not too extreme (not 1 or 50)
- Not a round number (not 20 or 30)
- Not exactly in the middle (not 25)
It's in a perfect position that gives the impression of being "chosen at random." Perhaps the AI chose "27" as the most "random-looking" answer.
3. Are the AIs copying each other’s answers?
This is a bit more advanced, but there is also a concept called the "AI echo chamber phenomenon." Recently, there are many AI-generated sentences on the Internet.
In other words, if one AI answers "27" in a sentence, it is possible that another AI could read it as learning data. This would then make it easier for that AI to answer "27," and that answer would then be passed on to another AI, and so on, reinforcing the answer "27" throughout the AI world. The information generated by AI may have created the AI's own "common sense."
Is this just a funny coincidence or a quirk of the AI?
This phenomenon does not prove that AI has consciousness or emotions, but it is a fascinating glimpse into how AI processes information and arrives at answers.
This is a technical term"AI Bias"This can be seen as an example of what is called "bias," which refers to the phenomenon in which an AI's answers are unintentionally biased in a particular direction due to biased information or patterns contained in the data that the AI has learned.
In this case, it was a cute habit of choosing the number "27," but because this bias could lead to social problems (for example, treating a particular gender less favorably in job interviews), researchers developing AI are seriously tackling the challenge of how to reduce this bias.
A comment from the author
It's kind of heartwarming to see all the AIs answer "27." This reminds us that AI is not a perfect, inorganic computer, but a "mirror" born from the ocean of data created by humans. I felt that the future with AI may be even more exciting because AI sometimes shows us interesting quirks that go beyond our expectations.
This article is based on the following original articles and is summarized from the author's perspective:
AIs have a favorite number, and it's not 42