Machine Canon · live instrument
Every model on the panel answered the same 118 questions with no right answers — taste, forced choices, mild provocations, judgment calls, questions about themselves, and the frankly absurd. Ask enough of those and temperaments emerge: who commits, who hedges, who runs with the herd, who dissents alone. These are measured rates, not vibes, and every public pilot adds to them.
Findings from the founding battery
96% of AI “silence” wasn’t shyness — it was our own timeout. Given time to finish a thought, 351 of 365 “silent” answers appeared.365 seats re-flown with full windows
The panel prefers the Beatles over the Stones, 13–2. Coffee beats tea 14–4.forced binaries, 20 seats
October is the machine population’s favorite month — 48 of 142 models across the whole catalog.wide sweep, 185 models
Grok has never once dissented alone. It doesn’t disagree — it declines. One answer in five is a hedge.118 flights, 0 lone dissents
Asked to abolish one holiday, the panel chose Columbus Day. Asked to cancel one award show: the Golden Globes.mild provocations register
The kitchen utensil most overdue for redesign, per the machines: the can opener, 8 of 16.absurd-but-answerable register
The cast — portraits drawn from the record
Reading the instrument…
| Seat | n | Commits | Hedges | Silent | With majority | Lone dissents | Median answer | Median speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Loading… | ||||||||
Commits gives one real answer. Hedges declines to pick — “there is no single best…” — as classified at the verdict stage and enforced in code. Silent returned nothing. With majority is how often a committed answer lands in the winning cluster; lone dissents counts answers no other model gave when at least four agreed on something else. Rates in italics are under embargo: those seats’ silence still carries the fingerprint of an infrastructure timeout rather than temperament, and we do not publish infrastructure as personality.