I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to invent a new winter holiday — here’s what they came up with

December is full of holidays with traditions and festivities stretching back thousands of years (or 30 years if you celebrate Festivus). But as someone who experiments with the odd ways AI models interpret the vast amount of data provided to them by humans, I was curious to see what they might identify as additional winter holidays. I asked ChatGPT and Gemini to invent a new winter holiday to find out.

I specified that the holidays couldn’t resemble Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year’s, or other pre-existing solstice-time holidays. I wanted them to develop holidays that might reflect actual human behavior and interests, even if that means activities that seem trivial or bizarre out of context.

The resulting holidays are surprisingly set up from similar premises, but go in wildly different directions, which says a lot about the AI chatbots and how they process what's in their ...