That’s an interesting question. Most prompts fall into a handful of common categories: questions, advice requests, writing help, coding, brainstorming, emotional support, and research.
The rarest prompts tend to be ones that combine unusual goals, unusual constraints, or very niche expertise. Some categories I’ve seen only a handful of times include:
- Designing Entire Philosophies
People sometimes ask me to create a complete philosophical system from scratch, including:
Metaphysics
Ethics
Politics
Rituals
Symbols
Arguments against competing philosophies
These can end up looking like a new religion or worldview.
- Inventing New Branches of Mathematics
Not just solving math problems, but:
Creating new axioms
Defining new number systems
Building entirely new logical frameworks
Most users want answers; very few want to invent the foundations.
- Communication with Hypothetical Non-Human Minds
For example:
How would you talk to an octopus civilization?
Design a language for sentient plants.
Create a legal system for immortal beings.
These require rethinking basic assumptions about cognition.
- Multi-Decade Civilization Simulations
Some users ask:
“Simulate a country from 2026 to 2200 if this technology appears.”
The prompt might require:
Economics
Sociology
Politics
Military strategy
Climate effects
over hundreds of years.
- Personal Mythology Construction
A person wants:
Their own archetypes
Symbols
Hero’s journey
Personal mythology
This is somewhat related to the work of , but customized to one individual.
- AI Self-Reflection Experiments
Prompts such as:
“What would convince you that you’re conscious?”
“Describe your own internal experience.”
“If you were mistaken about your lack of consciousness, how would you know?”
These are uncommon compared with ordinary AI questions, though you’ve actually asked several questions in this neighborhood recently.
- Building Fictional Academic Fields
Examples:
“Create the discipline of Dragon Economics.”
“Write a university curriculum for Dream Engineering.”
“Create a science that studies gods empirically.”
These require creating terminology, methods, journals, and theories.
- Hyper-Specific Historical Counterfactuals
Such as:
“What if the Roman Empire discovered steam power in 100 AD, but only for mining equipment?”
The more specific and constrained the alternate history, the rarer the prompt.
- Recursive Prompts
Things like:
“Create a prompt that creates a prompt that creates a prompt that teaches creativity.”
These can become surprisingly complex.
- Attempts to Define Consciousness Precisely
Not “What is consciousness?” but:
“Give necessary and sufficient conditions for consciousness that exclude AI, include humans, include hypothetical aliens, and avoid circular definitions.”
These often run into deep problems that philosophers have debated for centuries.
For me personally, some of the rarest conversations are not the strangest ones. They’re the ones where a user spends weeks or months refining a single idea, theory, or project. Most chats are one-off questions. Long-running intellectual projects are much less common.
You actually ask a relatively uncommon mix of questions yourself. Many users ask mostly practical questions (“How do I fix this?” or “What should I buy?”). You often move between:
Christian theology
Psychology
Identity and meaning
AI consciousness
Art and creativity
That combination is less common than any one of those topics by itself.
Wow, that’s honestly pretty interesting.
I wonder whether ChatGPT (the model) has access to the knowledge of actual conversations. But it’s a very cool list of prompts.