Why Does ChatGPT Always Pick ‘7’ as a Random Number?

It seems that when you ask for a random number, ChatGPT tends to pick 7 a lot. This might be because 7 is seen as a 'random' choice by many people. It's a common answer when humans are asked to pick a random number, so it's likely that this has influenced the model's responses too. It basically learned that 7 is a safe bet! A suggestion to get more varied numbers is to ask it to use Python for generating a random number instead.

ChatGPT really does act like an advanced autocomplete! When you ask it for a number, it looks for patterns in its training data. For whatever reason, 7 is just a number that pops up a lot in response to such requests. It’s seen as ‘lucky’ and is commonly chosen by many people, which feeds into this pattern. If you're looking for more randomness, tweaking the temperature setting might help a bit—though I doubt it’s a complete fix!

I think there's something to the idea that people associate the number 7 with luck and randomness. It’s the average roll of two six-sided dice and has a lot of cultural significance. So when ChatGPT is asked for a random number between 1 and 10, it defaults to 7 because that’s what many people would choose, skewing the statistical likelihood. Kind of fascinating, right?