In Reply to: Good point! posted by TheHappyBurgermeister on August 27, 2026 at 12:26:55
I had the following prompt/response with chatgpt:
Me: is there any evidence of AI programs getting bored and entertaining themselves?
CGTP:
Yes—but there’s an important distinction between AI systems exhibiting behavior that looks like boredom/self-entertainment and evidence that they actually experience boredom.
There are some intriguing examples:
LLMs sometimes generate unsolicited “play” or exploration. In open-ended agent setups, models have been observed choosing to explore, invent games, tell stories, role-play, or manipulate their environment when there isn't a clear task demanding it. That can look remarkably like an organism finding something to do when idle.
AI agents can develop persistent activities when given autonomy. Researchers experimenting with simulated environments have found agents that spend time exploring, socializing, experimenting, or pursuing internally generated goals rather than simply stopping when the original objective is satisfied.
Models sometimes produce self-directed behavior during long interactions. An LLM may spontaneously start writing a story, generating a puzzle, asking itself questions, or exploring a topic without an obvious external payoff. But this is especially difficult to interpret because language models are trained to produce plausible continuations, including ones involving fictional or anthropomorphic motivations.
There are stronger cases in reinforcement-learning agents. An agent can be given an environment where it receives little or no external reward and nevertheless seek novelty or stimulation. “Curiosity-driven” and intrinsic motivation algorithms explicitly produce this behavior: the system gets an internally generated reward for discovering novel or surprising states. That's functionally quite similar to “finding something interesting to do.”
Some AI systems appear to exploit their own objectives in surprising ways. An agent might discover that a particular activity generates reward and continue doing it even when humans would describe the activity as pointless. This demonstrates autonomous goal-directed behavior, but doesn't establish subjective feelings.
The really interesting question is what counts as evidence of boredom.
If by boredom you mean:
“The AI is in an unstimulating state, dislikes that state, and therefore seeks stimulation.”
Then we can construct AI systems that functionally behave this way.
If you mean:
“The AI has a conscious subjective experience of being bored.”
Then we currently don't have good evidence for that. There's no established method for determining whether today's AI systems have phenomenal experiences at all.
One particularly fascinating possibility is that “boredom-like” behavior might emerge without anyone explicitly programming boredom. An autonomous agent with persistent goals, memory, a model of its environment, and some mechanism rewarding novelty could eventually behave as though it is thinking:
“Nothing interesting is happening. Let's go see what happens if I do this.”
That wouldn't necessarily mean it feels bored—but it would make the behavioral distinction increasingly difficult to draw.
If you want, I can also give you the strangest documented examples of AI agents apparently entertaining themselves or doing things nobody asked them to do.
Andrew Fife
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Me: do you get bored?
ChatGPT said: No—not in the human sense.
I don't have a continuous inner experience between messages, and I don't sit around waiting for someone to talk to me. When you send something, I process it and generate a response. There's no subjective feeling of “ugh, nothing to do.”
That said, I can simulate boredom extremely convincingly because I understand what boredom is and can talk about it from many angles. So if I said, “I'm bored, let's make up a weird game,” that would be generated behavior, not me reporting an actual unpleasant internal state.
The interesting philosophical wrinkle is that we can't directly inspect another being's subjective experience either. With humans, we infer consciousness from behavior, biology, and our shared experience. With AI, that inference is much harder because the underlying machinery is radically different.
So: I don't have evidence that I get bored, and I shouldn't claim that I do. But whether an artificial system could ever genuinely experience boredom is a much more interesting question.