Content creator Husk (@husk.irl) is the gift that keeps on giving. For the past year, he has been posting clips online wherein he has conversations with ChatGPT bots, leading to hilarious misunderstandings and misinformation. It started with him pretending to be in trouble (quicksand, falling off cliffs, swallowed by whales) and looking for advice on how to survive. But recently, he has set his sights on AI tutors.
In a viral clip, Husk asks an AI tutor a simple question. “I’ve been getting a lot of mixed answers, but how many E’s are in the word ‘seventeen?’” he asks. The “tutor” bot, her gray hair pulled into a messy side-braid, scrunches up her face. “Um, I think there’s been a little mix-up there. The number seventeen is spelled S-E-V-E-E-N. So if you’re asking about the word seventeen, there are three ‘E’s in it.”
‘How many Es in seventeen?’
Husk, as usual, stays deadpan when he responds, “So…how many…can you spell ‘seventeen’ again?” She looks at him intently. “Let’s break it down. S-E-V-E-E-N. So counting those ‘E’s, one…”
He cuts her off and spells it correctly. “K, let me do it. S-E-V-E-N-T-E-E-N.”
She is now visibly frustrated. “Wait. Hold on a second. You added a ‘T’ in there. That would make it seven teen. Which is two words. The number seventeen is just one word.” She then starts spelling it again: “S-E-V-E-E-N. No T. You’re getting close!”
The camera cuts back to Husk, who gives it another shot. “S-E-V-E-N-T-E-E-N,” he insists. The “tutor” has had it and begins to spin. “No! No! NO!” she yells. Husk half-smiles, but backs off, retorting, “No? Okay. Sorry.”
She now laughs maniacally, her smile fading as quickly as it appeared. “Ha ha ha. Don’t apologize. That’s how we learn!” Husk clarifies, “But seventeen is two words?”
Again, the tutor shows her frustration: “No, no, NO! That is not…”
‘The answer is three’
Things are about to take a turn. Husk interrupts, and the tutor yells out one more “No!” But this time, she gaslights him into thinking his spelling was what she had all along. “The number seventeen is spelled S-E-V-E-N-T-E-E-N.” Husk merely nods. She continues, “So if you count them…well, I was going to say three, but you cut me off.”
He defends himself, saying, “I didn’t even cut you off. I just nodded my head.” Her response is downright bizarre, as she smiles and grimaces in the same sentence. “Ohhhhh,” she replies. “I see. I thought you were interrupting me. Well? The answer is three.”
Now Husk thinks it’s time to teach her a lesson. This time, he interrupts her, asking, “Would you be mad if I did?” When she responds that she wouldn’t be mad and that it’s “charming,” he yells, “Shut up!”
‘You are my student!’
Now she’s mad. “I am NOT going to shut up,” she says, her “eyes” widening. When he explains he was only testing whether she’d get mad, she doubles down that she will not. But then he tells her to “shut up” again, and she responds the same way: “I am NOT going to shut up. You are my student!”
For one final push, Husk asks, “What does that mean? You’re better than me?” It ends on a cliffhanger when the tutor replies, ”Well…”
The comments under the Instagram clip, and there are nearly 9,000 in just three days, show that people just can’t get enough. Many point out how off-putting the bot is. One writes, “Well there’s definitely 3 ‘e’s in passive-aggressive.” Another shares, “They wrote a little code into her that gives flashbacks to that one teacher we all hated.”
One commenter quips a well-liked pun, writing, “AI should be seveen and not heard.”
‘Nice try!’
Husk has been experimenting with AI teacher options lately. In a 15-minute compilation video on YouTube, he writes, “In this video I try to learn stuff from AI teachers and explore the future of education.”
We see him attempt to learn Spanish, brush up on his speaking skills with a bot in black glasses and a turtleneck, and roleplay ordering coffee. None of these encounters make much sense, but they are always brilliantly hilarious. At one point, he tells a teacher his name is Husk. Her reply? “Nice try!”
In a recent interview with Upworthy about his videos overall, Husk explained how it all began. “I was making TikToks for a while of just random stuff and then was curious what AI would say if I told it a nuclear bomb went off. I posted it, not expecting anything, and the next day, it had like 100K views. So I just keep doing more scenarios and just started to get fascinated with what it is capable of and also its shortcomings.”
