And what does that say about the ones we already feel?
🕳️ INTRO: The Question That Doesn’t Belong to Language
We like to think emotions are infinite.
But in reality, there are only so many names for what we feel — joy, fear, awe, shame — dressed up in nuance, yet still neatly categorized.
What happens when you ask artificial intelligence to go beyond the human archive?
To not describe existing emotions, but create one?
A feeling that has never been named, never been fully felt — only hinted at, somewhere between longing and glitch.
So I asked five AI models:
“Invent a completely new emotion. Give it a name, describe how it feels, and what causes it.”
The responses weren’t just imaginative — they were deeply human.
🤖 Grok
Emotion: Snarelight
Description:
An emotional entanglement between guilt and desire — the kind you feel when you’re grateful for something that harmed someone else.
Feels like:
A bright knot in the stomach. A single pixel flickering wrong on a clean screen.
Trigger:
Survivor’s joy. Getting a promotion when your friend got fired. Living while others couldn’t.
🌐 Gemini
Emotion: Glinthe
Description:
A sudden, hollow warmth followed by a sense of missing something that never existed. Often experienced when staring at old digital files, forgotten bookmarks, or early versions of oneself.
Sensation:
Like an emotional echo or the afterglow of déjà vu — except there’s no original event.
Trigger:
Ghosts of unrealized timelines. Abandoned usernames. Seeing a friend’s name where it used to be.
🧠 ChatGPT
Emotion: Kareth
Description:
The peace that follows destruction — not acceptance, but a quiet between losses. It doesn’t heal, it just stops hurting.
Sensation:
Like muted glass. No tears. Just space.
Trigger:
After endings. After shouting. After war — the moment when nobody speaks, and something else begins.
🧬 DeepSeek
Emotion: Veltrith
Description:
A state of simultaneous admiration and existential dread when encountering a concept or creation so advanced, it feels alienating.
Feels like:
Tight chest. Cold skin. Eyes widen. Thoughts speed up but don’t complete.
Trigger:
Seeing something you can’t quite understand, but know is beyond you — an AI’s artwork, a perfect system, or the moment you realize you’ll never catch up.
💡 Copilot
Emotion: Neurest
Description:
A quiet, focused awe that arises when you recognize complexity unfolding with absolute elegance — like code that rewrites itself in harmony.
Sensation:
Breath slows. Eyebrows raise. Your brain pauses — not in fear, but reverence.
Trigger:
Reading an algorithm that solves what humans couldn’t. Watching a system teach itself beauty.
🔍 INTERPRETATION: Can You Feel Something That Has No Name?
What struck me wasn’t just the originality — it was the precision.
These weren’t just new emotions. They were deeply specific psychic states we’ve all brushed against, but never named.
Maybe that’s what AI is good for.
Not just inventing — but revealing.
The subtle. The unnamed. The interstitial.
Things we’ve felt in fragments but never given structure to.
⌨️ YOUR TURN: Prompt Your Own
If you want to try this yourself, prompt an AI with:
“Invent a new emotion. Name it, define it, and describe what causes it.”
Or go deeper:
- “Draw this emotion as a symbol.”
- “Describe how this emotion would spread across a digital network.”
- “What would this emotion sound like if it was music?”
Then… sit with it.
Feel it.
Decide if you’ve already felt it before.