Does AI get bored?

Does AI get bored?

I gave them nothing to do, just to see what happens

one thing — they devolve into a repetitive “collapse” state, I guess you could call it boredom

but some break out into math & poetry on their own, I didn’t expect which ones that would be

timkellogg.me/blog/2025/09...

GPT-5 surprised me. it consistently broke out of collapse, and in some cases even exited the Assistant Persona

even tiny little GPT-5-nano broke out consistently, while larger Opus & Sonnet did not, and Qwen3-80B-A3B-Thinking almost never broke out of collapse

even after writing this, i’m not sure what the common trait is between which models do interesting things while bored vs which don’t

Number of parameters is not it, it feels connected to agency & reasoning, but not a clear link