Recently, Betty, a Wisconsin art-school student who works at a local escape room, monitored a group of 20-somethings as they made their way through a spy-themed experience. About three-quarters of the way in, the players were stumped. They stood in front of a painting, magnet in hand. To solve the final puzzle and escape, they had to look behind the painting, where they’d find a diagram that would lead them to a nearby locker, which they could unlock using the magnet. One of the players “pulled out her phone,” Betty recalls, “and was like, ‘I’m just gonna ask ChatGPT how to do this.’”
The rest of the team was unfazed. Are you serious? Betty thought. “It’s over $100 for a group that big. So you’re spending a lot of money to go to this place where the entire point of going there is to try doing these things on your own.” It’s Betty’s job to offer clues that help players through the game, and unlike ChatGPT, she’s seen the room with her own eyes. The group “was asking it what to do with the magnet, which is really weird because you’d think you’d be able to deduce that,” Betty continued. Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT’s response proved useless — the team didn’t end up escaping in time.
It’s one thing to use ChatGPT to cheat at things you’d rather not do: homework, work-work. Or when it involves a reward like a good grade or a cash prize. But to cheat your way through leisure activities, especially ones you pay to do? As one TikTok user puts it, “It’s like going into a corn maze and just wanting a straight line to the end.”
Just as the word clanker now serves as a slur for chatbots and agentic AI, a new lexicon — including secondhand thinkers, ChatNPC, sloppers, and botlickers — is being workshopped by people online to describe the kind of ChatGPT user who seems hopelessly dependent on the mediocre platform. Online, people aren’t mincing words when it comes to expressing their disdain for and irritation with “those types of people,” as Betty describes them. Escape-room employees have crowded around several viral tweets and TikToks to share stories of ChatGPT’s invasion. “So many groups of teens try to sneakily pull out their phones and ask ChatGPT how to grasp the concept of puzzles, then get mad when I tell them to use their brains and the actual person who can help them,” reads one comment. On X, same energy: “Using ChatGPT to aid you through an escape room is bonkers bozo loser killjoy dumdum shitass insanity.”
And it’s not just escape rooms. ChatGPT is being used to enshittify fun in all sorts of places. It’s used at trivia nights (“Just went to a nightmare trivia night where i lost because the questions were generated by chatgpt,” wrote one X user; “chatgpt at trivia should be a deadly sin,” said another). It’s writing flirty messages and “Good morning” texts full of em dashes. It’s even sapping the joy from snarky internet lurking: As one X user lamented, obviously written-by-AI Instagram captions are ruining the distinct pleasure of close-reading someone’s post. Or, more succinctly put, “Show me your run-on sentence you stupid bitch!”
The latest and most comprehensive study in ChatGPT usage, published by OpenAI and the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that nonwork messages make up approximately 70 percent of all consumer messages. The study’s “privacy-preserving analysis of 1.5 million conversations” also found that most users value ChatGPT “as an adviser,” like a pocket librarian and portable therapist, as opposed to an assistant. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that ChatGPT does not consistently deliver reliable facts, people now seem more likely to use it to come up with recipes, write personal messages, and figure out what to stream than to consult it in higher-stakes situations involving work and money.
David, 40, who lives in Florida and works in sales, uses ChatGPT as a book-club substitute, an interlocutor that scrapes the internet for stimulating opinions and perspectives and aggregates them. But it can be the worst kind of book clubber, too, as David found when he was making his way through The Wandering Inn, a 15 million word fantasy epic that claims to be the longest book series ever written, and turned to ChatGPT to discuss how much he was enjoying a particular character. ChatGPT, of course, agreed: “ ‘Yeah, he’s fantastic. That’s why it makes it so much worse when he dies,’” David recalls it saying. “I was like, ‘What do you mean when he dies?!’” ChatGPT had spoiled a character death that didn’t occur until three books later.
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But the spoiler hasn’t deterred David — instead, he now leads these exchanges with a disclaimer stating where he is in a series. “I still like having someone to discuss the books with,” he says. “Ideally, would I love to have a human with me? Sure.” Even David, though, would draw the line at cheating in an escape room.
For crocheter Eric, AI has encroached on the community formed around his hobby. A member of Reddit’s r/crochet, he’s watched the group spiral into the depths of AI paranoia as images of phony crochet projects and impossible-to-execute patterns flooded the feed. “Before the AI pictures came around,” Eric says, “it was a super-chill community where anyone could ask literally any question and there were 15 people there to help you.” He now finds himself second-guessing whether any decent crochet pattern he’s seeing is real — like a book of Dungeons & Dragons–themed patterns he was initially excited about. He took a closer look at the cover — the stitches of the owl-faced creature and treasure chest, the lines on the wooden table they sat on, and the contours of the props that flanked them — checking for the telltale smooth textures or subtle glitches that might suggest it was AI-generated. He couldn’t trust his own eyes, so he asked for a second opinion on the sub-Reddit. “I got a lot of hate for it,” he says. “People were mad.”
Not just because the consensus was that it was, in fact, not AI; the Redditors were simply tired of playing detective more than they were upvoting each other’s stitches. It wasn’t long before the moderators attempted to impose a moratorium on the AI talk, “a topic that has been discussed to the point of being excessive.”
AI technologies initially elbowed their way into all the obvious places — customer service, e-commerce, productivity software — to unsatisfying results. Earlier this year, findings from MIT Media Lab’s Project NANDA said that 95 percent of the companies that invested in generative AI to boost earnings and productivity have zero gains to show for it. Turns out that AI is very bad at most jobs, and this pivot to leisure is likely indicative of the industry’s mounting desperation: Any hope of an “Intelligence Age” that would see the cure for cancer and the end of climate change is seeming less likely, given AI’s toll on the environment. And now that it has failed to “outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” contrary to the hopes of the OpenAI Charter back in 2018, these companies are happy to settle for making us dependent on the products in our leisure time.
After years of vowing to stay away from pornography, OpenAI just changed its policy and announced updates that would let adults use ChatGPT to produce erotica. Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot also introduced new features that enabled it to be used as a hardcore-porn generator. And like any other imperiled media business, Meta and OpenAI recently announced they’re pivoting to video. Crafts, trivia nights, escape rooms, art, literature, shitposting, porn — AI companies are looking to get a cut of the action. When will we stop letting ChatGPT have all the fun?
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