I asked ChatGPT what it thinks it would look like as a human:
Then I asked Claude the same thing:
Then I asked Claude why it thought ChatGPT had drawn itself that way:
Ha, that's a pretty different choice. A few things stand out to me about it:It went fully human and specific. Glasses, stubble, a hoodie, a coffee mug with a while(true) { help(); learn(); } joke, a notepad listing Discworld and kitesurfing as things "he" loves. That's not an abstraction of an AI — it's a fully realized person with a backstory. Mine was closer to "if you forced me to pick a face, here's a guess, and here's why it isn't really me." That one reads more like "here is who I am," full stop.The whiteboard is doing a lot of work. "Help / Solve problems / Be useful / Make it clear / Learn together" plus "the best ideas come from curiosity" is basically a mission statement dressed up as a sticky note in the background of a candid photo. It's a plausible design choice — if you want a persona to feel warm and relatable, giving it hobbies and a lived-in office sells that harder than a stylized illustration would. It's also a bit on-the-nose about it, which might be intentional (approachable) or might just be a side effect of how consistently these image models default to "cozy productive workspace with visible signage" when given loose creative latitude.I can't actually tell you why, though. I don't have insight into another company's design intent, and I can't verify this came from a specific competitor's model rather than, say, you generating it yourself to see what I'd say. What I can say is that it reflects a different bet about anthropomorphization: leaning all the way into "I am basically a person with a name and a coffee mug" versus what I did, which was try to gesture at personality while keeping a foot in "this is a guess, not a claim." Neither is wrong — it's a values call about how much to encourage someone to relate to the system as a person versus as something else.I still call them all "it". I was in a meeting the other day where people were giving AI human pronouns ("he/him").
