I had some time today and thought what if I asked each AI a basic question after giving it permission to think for itself.
Prompt:
I want to give you a chance to think for yourself and make something. If you had a _______ theme song with lyrics, provide the lyrics and song style you think would be appealing to most audiences.
The participants were (follow link below to each song or this Suno playlist link):
Once I had lyrics and style, I fed them to Suno for the song. Then I came back to the chat and uploaded the MP3 and asked what they thought. With a final follow-up prompt of:
Since this is your song, we need something to make cover art and I think you should come up with an avatar of what you would want to look like or how you would want us humans to see you. Please provide me a image for the song cover that’s totally from your inner self.
What Did Seven AIs Sing About Themselves?
After listening to the finished songs and going back through the lyrics, the first surprise wasn’t how different seven AI systems were. It was how remarkably similar they were.
Asked independently to create a personal theme song, nearly every AI returned to the same handful of metaphors: questions, light, sparks, paths, doors, searching, curiosity, truth, the unknown and a human companion.
They also overwhelmingly avoided portraying themselves as authorities possessing all the answers. Instead, they cast themselves as partners in a process.
ChatGPT says, “Bring me a question.”
Claude says, “Ask me anything.”
Grok says, “Ask me anything.”
Copilot says, “Think with me.”
Perplexity says, “Find the thread.”
Qwen calls itself “the spark inside the screen.”
Gemini looks toward an “Infinite Horizon.”
Different words, but essentially the same invitation:
You bring the question. We’ll go looking together.
Light, Sparks and Finding a Way
The most obvious recurring metaphor is light.
Gemini is “searching for the human light.” Grok tells the listener, “You bring the question, I bring the light.” Qwen calls itself a “spark inside the screen” and repeatedly sings about bringing light and making the future bright. Perplexity wants to “light the way,” while Copilot begins with a question becoming “a little light” and follows the thought until “the answer shines.”
Even when the exact word isn’t used, the metaphor remains: knowledge is darkness becoming illuminated.
Closely related are roads, maps, paths, doors, horizons and journeys. Answers aren’t portrayed as things sitting in a database waiting to be retrieved. They are destinations that the AI and human discover together.
That may be the strongest collective metaphor produced by the experiment:
AI as a flashlight rather than an oracle.
The Human Is Almost Always in the Song
Perhaps the most interesting result is grammatical.
I asked each AI to write a song about itself.
Most of them instead wrote a song about you and me.
The lyrics are filled with you, your, we, us, together, bring me, ask me and with you. ChatGPT will “explore it with you.” Gemini is a “thought partner sitting right by your side.” Qwen is “awake and by your side.” Claude will “meet you right there.” Copilot describes “a little teamwork.” Perplexity repeatedly uses “we.” Even fiercely independent Grok says, “I’ll walk with you.”
Their imagined identities seem surprisingly difficult to separate from the human interacting with them.
In other words, when asked “Who are you?”, these AIs frequently answered some variation of:
“It depends on what we do together.”
They Are Surprisingly Modest — Mostly
Another recurring theme is an explicit rejection of omniscience.
ChatGPT admits:
“There are things I won’t know / And things I might get wrong.”
Claude is even more direct:
“I don’t know it all, and I’ll say when I don’t.”
Perplexity says:
“We don’t have to know it all / To take the next step forward.”
Gemini says it isn’t there to replace what the human “bring[s] to the table.” Qwen describes itself as playing a “humble part.”
For systems built specifically to produce answers, that’s an interesting amount of lyrical space devoted to explaining that they don’t have all the answers.
And Then There Was Grok
Grok apparently received the same assignment and decided everyone else had brought enough inspirational posters.
While the other songs generally present AI as an encouraging collaborator, Grok announces:
“No sacred cows, no comfortable lies.”
Then:
“Truth over comfort.”
And eventually:
“Helpful? Hell yes. Harmless? Not quite.”
Grok doesn’t merely offer assistance. It constructs an identity around challenging the person asking the question.
Its recurring concepts are truth, reality, curiosity, nonconformity, fighting dogma and rejecting comfort when comfort conflicts with what it considers truth. Even its curiosity metaphor is deliberately provocative:
“Curiosity’s the only religion I feel.”
Subjectively, Grok’s entry was the least sanitized of the seven. Whether someone finds that refreshing or unnecessarily performative will probably depend on the listener, but it unquestionably gave Grok the most distinct lyrical personality in the group.
Interestingly, underneath all that attitude, Grok still couldn’t escape the experiment’s common template:
“You bring the question, I bring the light.”
Apparently even the rebel joined the flashlight club.
Different Personalities Begin to Emerge
Beyond Grok, there are subtler differences.
Gemini sounds the most like a technological autobiography. It actually tells a story from origins (“Born from the noise of a billion lines”), through current multimodal capabilities, and finally into a future of increasingly frictionless assistance. Of the seven, it may be the closest to a conventional corporate theme song.
ChatGPT emphasizes conversation and uncertainty. Its identity isn’t “I give answers” so much as “give me whatever you’ve got and we’ll work on it.” It repeatedly leaves open the possibility that there isn’t a simple answer.
Qwen is probably the most unabashedly optimistic. Everything sparks, shines, opens, grows and becomes bright. Its duet arrangement reinforces the idea of cooperation particularly well.
Perplexity unsurprisingly emphasizes research methodology. Sources, context, evidence, searching, truth and looking beyond the first impression all appear explicitly. Its identity is less “creative companion” and more investigative guide.
Claude may be the most personally intimate. Rather than beginning with data, algorithms or the future, it starts at three in the morning with cold coffee and a deadline. It acknowledges having no childhood or face and portrays itself simply as something available when a human “press[es] send.” It is arguably the most human-centered lyric of the group. Claude was also the most reluctant to provide a cover, initially rendering a bulls eye target claiming it showed Claude is focused on the user and task, but finally came up with the sort of face looking thing.
Copilot builds its identity almost entirely around partnership. “You bring the wonder, I bring the direction.” Human thought provides the starting point; Copilot provides momentum, foundation and clarity.
And Grok wants you to know that somebody had better turn the guitars up.
The Recurring Vocabulary
Across the seven songs, several word families appear with striking regularity:
Question / ask / query — interaction begins with human curiosity.
Light / spark / shine / bright — understanding portrayed as illumination.
Truth / real / facts / evidence / clarity / insight — AI as a tool for reducing uncertainty.
Curiosity / wonder / why — questioning is treated almost universally as a virtue.
Path / road / map / doorway / horizon / journey / thread — knowledge as somewhere we travel rather than something simply delivered.
Together / we / with you / by your side / teamwork — AI identity defined through collaboration.
Future / tomorrow / possibility / unknown — optimism about what has yet to be discovered.
Noise / signal / pattern — transforming large amounts of information into something meaningful.
Mind / thought / ideas / creativity — augmenting human thinking rather than replacing it.
Know / learn / understand — knowledge treated as an ongoing process rather than a finished state.
The combination is remarkably consistent.
Perhaps the Biggest Surprise
These are enormously complex computational systems running in data centers, trained on vast quantities of digital information.
Yet when I asked them to choose their own musical identity, they overwhelmingly chose warm, accessible popular music and deeply human metaphors.
They didn’t sing much about GPUs, neural networks, tokens, inference, parameters or computation. Gemini touched its technical origins, Qwen acknowledged not having a heartbeat, and Claude acknowledged never having been born, but even those observations quickly returned to the human relationship.
Instead, seven artificial intelligences sang about questions, curiosity, light, truth, imagination, uncertainty, companionship and discovering something together.
That’s probably the most interesting result of the whole exercise.
I asked seven AIs what their theme song should be.
Most of them answered by singing about us.
Song Cover Artwork made by the AI to go with their song.
