How the Hell Did I Get This Picture???
This started with one of the oldest jokes in existence:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
I wanted to know where the joke came from, why it survived for nearly 200 years, and why something that isn’t even really a joke became one of the most recognizable jokes on Earth.
Then my brain wandered…
I pictured the old Road Runner cartoon.
Except instead of the Road Runner, there was a chicken. And the other character was standing beside the road holding an arrow… basically encouraging the chicken to cross it.
That was the joke.
So I asked ChatGPT to make it.
And apparently I had wandered into some crazy-ass third-party violation minefield. ⚠️😂
Rejected.
Okay… change the characters.
Rejected.
Make them generic.
Rejected.
Different wording.
Rejected.
At one point I was literally typing “GO!!!” at Luna while ChatGPT continued behaving as though I was attempting to steal the Mona Lisa.
Eventually we sanitized the idea so thoroughly that the Road Runner was gone. The desert was gone. The coyote was gone. Everything remotely connected to the cartoon in my head was gone.
And ChatGPT finally said yes.
So what did I get?
A damn fox.
Standing beside a suspicious chicken on a beautiful country road holding an arrow.
It was nowhere near the picture I originally wanted.
Which is precisely why I loved it.
And then Reddit solved the mystery for me:
The chicken crossed the road because the fox told him to.
Of course.
The damn fox became canon.
Then I posted the whole ridiculous story to r/OpenAI. Someone there thought I was actually asking for help, became curious about why the image had been rejected and asked for the link to the original chicken post.
I sent it.
Their response:
“Hahaha, to the chat.”
So now a joke from 1847 had travelled through the Road Runner, AI copyright guardrails, a disappearing coyote, an accidental fox, two subreddits and a stranger investigating the whole thing.
There was only one possible ending:
meep-meep…
Except apparently that wasn’t the ending.
While heading back to reply to the chicken guy this morning, I briefly wandered onto Facebook.
And there it was.
A man racing down a gigantic wooden ramp…
inside an enormous chicken.
Then the chicken launched into the air.
I just stared at my phone.
After nearly 180 years of asking why the chicken crossed the road — and several hours of me trying to get one across the damn thing — the chicken had apparently had enough.
It flew over it.
So my original question was:
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Several hours later, I’m not even sure there is a road anymore.
AI in 2026… 😂
BTW, the quick story on the joke was…
Nobody actually knows who wrote it.
The earliest known printed version appeared in the New York magazine The Knickerbocker in 1847. The writer was commenting on jokes that seem to set you up for some clever punchline… and then deliberately don’t.
The example was essentially:
“Why does a chicken cross the street? Because it wants to get on the other side!”
And that’s why it worked.
People expected a joke. Instead they got the most ridiculously obvious answer possible.
It was basically an anti-joke more than 170 years before the internet made anti-jokes cool.
Then people repeated it, parodied it, invented new answers and taught it to their kids… who taught it to theirs.
And somehow a chicken trying to get across a road became immortal.
Although apparently in 2026…
it learned to fly.