When Sookie Orth sat down to write her college essay last fall, something quickly came to mind. Orth, then a senior at Sequoyah School in Pasadena, began her draft with a declaration: "I learned how to fold a pizza box at the age of nine." She told the story of her years-long connection with Pizza of Venice in Altadena, where she often dined with her family as a little kid. One day, the manager invited her to assemble a box. Impressed with Orth's speed, the woman told her she could work at the pizzeria when she was older.

Like a lot of people, Alex Woolner was instantly fascinated by ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot which took the internet by storm when it launched in November 2022. But instead of asking it to write screenplays or satirical poetry or magazine articles (OK, not really), she turned it toward her hobby: making cute crochet animals called amigurumi. "Crochet patterns in and of themselves are kind of like a code," says Woolner, who works for a study-abroad organization and also cofounded an arts and activism collective called Attack Bear Press. "I wanted to see what ChatGPT would produce if I asked it for a crochet pattern." The results were … well … adjectives such as "monstrous" spring to mind.

The meteoric rise of ChatGPT has sparked an artificial intelligence frenzy, stoking fears that the technology could upend jobs, search engines and schools. But online creators have identified one realm yet safe from the computer takeover: fiber arts. A number of TikTok users have deployed ChatGPT to write patterns for crochet creations, yielding “cursed” results that are testing the boundaries of nascent artificial intelligence capabilities. In January TikTok user Alexandra Woolner, who has been knitting for years and crocheting since 2019, hatched the idea to use ChatGPT to make a stuffed animal – initially asking it to write a pattern for a narwhal. A typical crochet pattern resembles coding in its own way, with abbreviations and punctuation marks denoting the creation process. Woolner was impressed to find that ChatGPT returned comprehensive instructions that resembled a typical pattern. Following the pattern exactly, they created what was described as an “AI-

The meteoric rise of ChatGPT has sparked an artificial intelligence frenzy, stoking fears that the technology could upend jobs, search engines and schools. But online creators have identified one realm yet safe from the computer takeover: fiber arts. A number of TikTok users have deployed ChatGPT to write patterns for crochet creations, yielding "cursed" results that are testing the boundaries of nascent artificial intelligence capabilities. In January TikTok user Alexandra Woolner, who has been knitting for years and crocheting since 2019, hatched the idea to use ChatGPT to make a stuffed animal – initially asking it to write a pattern for a narwhal. A typical crochet pattern resembles coding in its own way, with abbreviations and punctuation marks denoting the creation process.