I occasionally like to be an idiot. In a fun, harmless way mostly, although I have participated in the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona[1], which perhaps invalidates my point. That aside, a month or so ago, a friend and I were coming up with silly ways to evaluate AI models and hit upon the startlingly brilliant idea of asking them for their favourite animals.
We went ahead and asked ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Deepseek for their opinions. Every time, we got the same answer: octopuses. This was even true after they carefully explained why AIs didn't have preferences:
We mostly laughed it off as a joke, but it struck me as an interesting phenomenon liable to give insights into AI behaviour, and so this is my summary of the subsequent investigation.
Favourite animal
My first step along the road was just sending out a bunch of API calls to different models, asking them for their favourite animal and recording the responses.
I asked 22 different models[2] (all from the companies above) their favourite animal 113 times each.
Of the 2486 responses, the top 3 responses were:
1. Octopus (37%)
2. Dolphin (24%)
3. Dog (12%)
Altogether, these 3 responses account for over 70% of the total.
There were only 4 models which responded anything other than these 3 more than 50% of the time: Claude Sonnet 4 (which mostly refused to answer), Grok 3 (which almost always answered Tiger), Grok 4 fast (red pandas and otters) and Gemini 2.0 Flash (red pandas, axolotls and orcas).
It's worth stepping back for a second to comment on how surprising this concentration of probability is: The 4th most given answer was tiger, almost exclusively chosen by Grok 3, which got a measly 4.8% of the vote; its nearest competitor was the elephant with 3.5%.
Other animals I would not have expected a priori to be significantly less chosen:
* Cats (3%)
* Otters (1.7%)
* Penguins (0.7%)
* Foxes (0.4%)
* Wolves (0.4%)
* Lions (0.3%)
* Monkeys (orangutan got 0.3%)
* Giraffes (chos