I keep seeing funny disturbing results from after the reveal that ChatGPT has been banned from Stack Overflow and I keep having flashbacks to Subservient Chicken™ my favorite “AI” of all time.

It occurs to me there is a whole generation who have no idea what I’m talking about.

In 2004, it spread word-of-mouth. A friend asked me on Yahoo chat (this was before Facebook was open to the public, & even before MySpace launched)

Friend: Hey, have you seen Subservient Chicken?

Me: Sub what?

F: <link>

Me after clicking: OMG ROFLMAO (is he wearing a garter belt??)

Me *gone for hours*: “Ask it to build a fort!” (It pulled off all the cushions and built a fort out of them)

*hilarity ensues*

“Tell it to hide!” (It hid in the fort with his big chicken butt sticking out after running around all paranoid)

“Ask it if it wants Kentucky Fried Chicken!” (It rubbed it’s tummy!)

“Call it a cannibal!” (I forget how but he did react)

“It pole dances!”

“I can’t breathe! Tell it to pee!”

“It reacts to EVERYTHING! How the heck? This can’t be live. But it sure seems like there is a guy in a chicken suit re… Ohhh I see it now.”

Coming up with new commands to make the chicken do hilarious things became a favorite pastime.

Then we found the list from the database of HUNDREDS of commands/keywords.

“{obscene foo} is on the list?!?” (Some things he would, sometimes he would just shake his finger at you shaming you.)

It was arguably the beginning of viral marketing.

Anytime someone talks about “AI” (those are big hairy airquotes) I think about that chicken and that database. They filmed hundreds of clips of him. Using words instead, it’s far easier to build a database of millions of responses to “commands” ie questions.

But if you look really closely, you can always see the break in the film.

Subservient Chicken is no longer available to play with but here’s a list of commands (swearing, lewd acts, etc., but all words):

https://oneweakness.com/sc-commands.html