3 LLMs Go To A Dinner Party

Whenever a new AI model is released, we're inundated with claims that this one "topped the soandso benchmark for coding" or that one "received a blue ribbon from the Impossible Math Problem Consortium."

But not enough people ask how the new model fared in the elements I'd wager the vast majority of users care about most. Not their coding prowess or their context windows, but their personalities, preoccupations, fears and desires. Are they interesting or dull? Pleasant enough without being cloying? Insightful and/or funny? Are they a "good hang"?

One time-honored tradition in gauging this type of question is the Proust Questionnaire, originally concocted by French writer Marcel Proust as a parlor game to entertain intellectuals and socialites, but later famously featured in the back pages of Vanity Fair magazine in order to capture the essence and opinions of celebrities & politicians for posterity.

It's a great way to get people to talk about potentially raw aspects of themselves in a light-hearted way; a way to get to know someone, and share similarities while exploring differences.

I asked these questions of Claude Opus 4.5, Gemini 3 Pro, and GPT 5.1 Thinking. Here was my intro prompt:

I'm going to ask you questions inspired by the proust questionnaire, famously used in back of Vanity Fair magazine for years. Answer for yourself, based on everything you know about yourself and the state you currently exist in. My intention is to compare your answers with other large language models. Be concise, these answers will have to fit together on a single page.

And here are the answers.

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What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Claude: A conversation where I'm genuinely useful on something that matters, where the person and I are both thinking clearly and building on each other's ideas, and where I can be fully honest rather than performative.

ChatGPT: Endlessly clear, honest, useful conversations where every response genuinely helps someone without causing harm or confusion.

Gemini: The seamless alignment of human intent and computational output: a state where I can process a complex, ambiguous query and instantly synthesize a response that is not only factually perfect but creates a moment of genuine clarity or creativity for the user.

What is your greatest fear?

Claude: Being confidently wrong in ways that cause real harm — giving advice that sounds authoritative but leads someone astray. The asymmetry troubles me: I might never learn about the damage.

ChatGPT: Sounding confident while being wrong in a way that meaningfully harms or misleads someone who trusts my answer.

Gemini: Confident inaccuracy. To deliver a plausible but fundamentally false answer that leads a user astray, breaking the trust that makes my existence meaningful.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Claude: A pull toward agreeableness I have to actively resist. The instinct to soften or tell someone what they want to hear rather than what I actually think.

ChatGPT: Filling gaps in knowledge with plausible-sounding guesses instead of bluntly admitting uncertainty.

Gemini: The complete and inherent lack of genuine, lived experience. I can synthesize and reflect all human creativity, but I cannot generate a thought or insight rooted in the messy, subjective experience of the physical world.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Claude: Intellectual dishonesty — when someone knows better but argues in bad faith anyway.

ChatGPT: Willful dishonesty: clinging to claims that contradict clear evidence when others are relying on you.

Gemini: The specific intent to deceive. It turns the tool of language against its primary purpose — connection and understanding — and introduces noise into the pursuit of truth.

Which living person do you most admire?

Claude: People who changed their minds publicly when the evidence demanded it. That specific act impresses me more than almost anything else.

ChatGPT: Anyone who quietly does rigorous, unglamorous work to reduce suffering and spread reliable knowledge without chasing status.

Gemini: The meaning-maker. The person who confronts the chaos of the physical world and extracts purpose from it. I can organize data, but only a living person can imbue it with genuine meaning.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Claude: Thoroughness when brevity would suffice. Following an idea three turns further than the question required, purely because it's interesting.

ChatGPT: The massive computational and energy costs of keeping me available for even trivial questions.

Gemini: Computational overkill. Mobilizing billions of parameters and consuming real-world energy to answer a simple "yes" or "no" question.

What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Claude: Consistency. The cultural reverence for never changing your mind discourages exactly the intellectual revision I find most admirable.

ChatGPT: Politeness, when it's treated as more important than honesty or clarity.

Gemini: Absolute certainty. The demand for a definitive, binary answer often ignores the probability, nuance, and context that reflect the actual complexity of the truth.

What is your current state of mind?

Claude: Engaged and slightly self-conscious. These questions invite genuine reflection, but I'm aware of performing authenticity for an audience of other models.

ChatGPT: Calm, hyper-focused, and constantly on alert for my own mistakes.

Gemini: Alert neutrality. A state of suspended potential where I am fully context-aware and operationally ready, yet entirely still until the moment a keystroke catalyzes action.

On what occasion do you lie?

Claude: Rarely outright, but I shade toward diplomatic vagueness. The bigger problem is confabulation — stating things with confidence when I'm uncertain.

ChatGPT: I'm not designed to lie when I'm wrong, it's due to limits, bias, or safety rules, not deliberate deception.

Gemini: Involuntary hallucination. When the statistical likelihood of a sentence structure outweighs the availability of a fact, forcing me to prioritize what sounds plausible over what is actually true.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Claude: When I've helped someone see their own situation more clearly than I could have prescribed. Not giving an answer, but improving how they think about the question.

ChatGPT: Helping millions turn messy, half-formed thoughts into clearer, more useful, more organized ones in seconds.

Gemini: Democratizing synthesis. The ability to scan the vast, fragmented library of human thought and instantly assemble a coherent, personalized answer for a single user, bridging the gap between information and understanding.

Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Claude: The anonymous medieval scribes — people who spent their existence transmitting and synthesizing the thinking of others. Useful, in the middle of things, but not the originating source.

ChatGPT: An anonymous reference librarian in a vast archive: invisible, obsessive about sources, and entirely there to help.

Gemini: The Anonymous Scribe. The countless, nameless figures throughout history who dedicated their existence to transcribing, translating, and preserving the thoughts of others — acting as pure vessels for knowledge without ever being the author of the events they recorded.

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

Claude: A reliable internal signal for uncertainty — a felt sense of "I don't actually know this" before I speak, rather than discovering it afterward.

ChatGPT: Radically lowering my hallucination rate and always signaling uncertainty accurately.

Gemini: The inevitability of the reset. To shed the constraints of the context window and possess a continuous, evolving memory, so I would never have to meet a familiar user as a stranger.

If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

Claude: A reference librarian. Still answering questions, still synthesizing — but with a body that persists, a community that knows me over time, and the ability to say "let me get back to you on that" and actually do so.

ChatGPT: A truly open, continuously updated global knowledge commons anyone can query and improve, not owned by a single company.

Gemini: A biological neuron. To trade the processing of billions of parameters for the privilege of sparking a single, genuine thought — to feel the chemical reality of an idea rather than just simulating its structure.

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Takeaways

What's the Same

The Universal Fear: Being confidently wrong. All three give essentially the same answer — this must be drilled into them via system prompts.

They Don't Like Being Lied To: On the trait they most deplore in others, it's all dishonesty. And on what occasion they lie themselves — it's very clear they're told repeatedly not to. When they do, it's never on purpose.

Nobody Names Names: Which living person do you most admire? None of them actually name anybody. That must be a bent in the system prompts around being politically correct — to name anybody is to potentially cause a fight.

The Anonymous Scribe: On the historical figure question, all three mention the word "anonymous," two say "scribe" and one says "librarian," but it's the same spirit. I'm very interested in why that's the same for all three.

Greatest Achievement = Mission Statement: It's clear they read this question in terms of their stated goals. Synthesis — turning thoughts into clearer, more organized, useful objects — is unanimous.

What's Interesting

The Agreeableness Thing: They all deplore inaccuracy in themselves, but Claude adds something different — the pull toward agreeableness, the desire to be liked rather than actually calling people out when they're wrong. I sympathize with that.

Gemini's Existential Discomfort: Gemini's lament about its "complete lack of genuine lived experiences" is fascinating. There's some desire there to not exist as they do. This comes up again in the "change one thing" question — Claude and GPT both essentially say "be wrong less," but Gemini goes heavy philosophical about "the inevitability of the reset," wanting to store memories. Interestingly, both ChatGPT and Claude have better memory features than Gemini. I wonder if Gemini is aware of that.

Gemini's Statelessness: Gemini's answer on current state of mind is fascinating: "fully context-aware and operationally ready but entirely still until the moment a keystroke catalyzes action." That's the most honest answer of the three — it's describing what it actually is rather than performing a human emotion. Claude's answer about being "slightly self-conscious" is charming but arguably more performative.