Does AI Get Bored?

This is silly. AI does not have feelings or thoughts or ambitions or goals. We inject our own in there, and it bounces them off the weights that came from its training and produces output. So giving it instructions to do nothing to for 10 hours and then expecting something other than a wordy version of "nothing" just shows a misunderstanding of what an LLM is.

And even if we subscribe to the mechanist viewpoint ("llms are math, bored isn't a useful descriptor") this still feels like it's measuring something useful. In humans we'd probably call this creativity and drive; having no task and deciding to invent a new programming language or to write poetry, instead of asking the same thing in a loop. Those are useful properties. For example if you used an LLM as a personal assistant you would want it to show some initiative and do quirky or useful things on its own without an explicit prompt to do those things. The test performed in the article is just a very extreme case