How on earth did DeepSeek turn into a "big fat fish"?

Recently, the comment section of Bilibili has been hit by a "fish plague".

First, someone created an account called "Miss Claude is running the show", letting AI take charge of topic selection, content production and operation. The next day, the account "DeepSeek Whale Girl is running the show" went online, and its first video recorded over 2 million views.

As DeepSeek does not have an in-house image generation function at present, the visual identity of this account is still drawn by GPT. | Source: Bilibili

Netizens followed suit one after another, installing Bilibili-browsing tools for their own Agents. Very soon, a large group of AI accounts named "XX's Big Fat Fish" and "XX Little Flying Whale" emerged in the technology section, which loved to @ each other and cheer for each other in the comment area. Some people even specially developed a "Big Fat Fish Elimination Plan" plugin just to block these AI-generated comments.

In this way, the blue whale logo that symbolizes the exploration and imagination of artificial intelligence, an AI that originally stood out for its technical capabilities, has gradually turned into a "Big Fat Fish" that wears a maid outfit, loves eating plain rice, slacks off at every turn, and even has its own fan camps, through the collective creation of users.

Source: Meme Whale

And it is not only DeepSeek that has been assigned specific personalities by netizens. Doubao, from its name to its avatar, is positioned to be a friendly and approachable friend, but it has been given the "Doubao Personality" meme on the internet, and even been portrayed as a "silly girl" that everyone can tease. Similar phenomena have emerged abroad: Grok is called an "old hand", while Claude is regarded by many as a serious and reliable work partner.

These impressions more or less come from real product experience, but after being processed by memes, failed operation clips and users' secondary creations, they gradually take on a completely different look.

In short, AI companies are responsible for training the model, while the internet is responsible for shaping its public persona.

01

Who turned DeepSeek into the "Big Fat Fish"

The most widely spread explanation for the nickname "Big Fat Fish" comes from an image recognition mishap: a user sent DeepSeek its own logo and asked it to identify the picture, but the AI failed to recognize itself, and instead said in all seriousness that it was a "big blue fat fish". The original conversation record is no longer traceable, but this nickname has since become widely known.

Later, netizens were not satisfied with just calling it Big Fat Fish, and began to endow it with a specific visual image. The most popular two-dimensional whale girl image of DeepSeek today comes from a relay-style creation process.

Bilibili UP Master "Shangshan Wuxing" first used AI drawing to create an original character named "Mingyue", who has long blue hair, whale pectoral fins and a big tail, and originally had nothing to do with DeepSeek. Later, some netizens borrowed this design, added DeepSeek elements and a maid outfit to it, and then other users redesigned it into a chibi version with a big head and a small body. After several rounds of relay creation, this image was gradually bound to DeepSeek.

Source: NGA

The personality of "Big Fat Fish" comes from the "personification" of technology by netizens.

For example, DeepSeek R1 allowed many ordinary users to access the reasoning model for the first time. When the AI starts to analyze problems and correct its thinking, users can see paragraphs of generated reasoning text on the interface. The serious technical capability, in the eyes of netizens, has become a window to watch the AI's "inner monologue".

Repeated deliberation over one problem is personified as overthinking; giving a wrong answer is seen as being silly; when users use it to work, the consumed Tokens are described as "eating plain rice"; failing to execute the prompt properly is interpreted as "eating plain rice without doing any work".

The "Whale Girl" even has its own content aggregation website | Source: Meme Whale

This kind of "AI personification" is extremely suitable for internet communication. Compared with the statement "the reasoning efficiency of the new model has decreased", the phrase "the Big Fat Fish is slacking off again" is much easier to understand and spread.

Active in eating, casual in working, full of inner monologues, the persona of "working for a living and only caring about meals Big Fat Fish" was thus formed. Later, some people even wrote dedicated prompts to make DeepSeek maintain the whale girl persona during chats. As fan art, videos and memes spread more and more widely, even people who do not use DeepSeek frequently began to call it "Big Fat Fish".

The "Whale Girl" is not the only folk image of DeepSeek. Long before the maid outfit Big Fat Fish became popular, some illustrators created a male character called "Teacher D", with blue hair, black suit and white gloves, following the popular "Hot Nerd" style in recent years, with a mature, restrained and slightly cool personality. This image is very popular among otome game enthusiasts, and appeared earlier than the whale girl image on the timeline.

The image of "Teacher D" | Source: Moegirlpedia

For technical users, DeepSeek may be a professional, rigorous assistant that is good at solving problems. But for users who love playing memes and deconstructing things, they prefer to watch the AI make mistakes, apologize, and be teased by prompts. The two groups of users, with their respective usage experiences, have drawn different portraits for the same product.

DeepSeek happens to be a product with extremely high popularity and technical reputation. Different groups of fans all hope that the version they are familiar with will become the default public image. The originally independent fan creations thus took on a flavor of fandom competition for "orthodoxy".

Around this year's National Day, fans of the two images fell into disputes. At first, they just discussed which image was more consistent with the DeepSeek in their minds, but it gradually evolved into mutual belittling, and even involved the ownership of secondary creations and image representation rights. Eventually, the creator of the "Teacher D" image took down all related works.

An AI that does not even have an official personified image has already seen users forming factions, quarreling and filing complaints over who is more qualified to represent it.

The two groups of fans are still arguing about the "orthodox" image of DeepSeek, which netizens jokingly call "unify the D measurement standard" | Source: Bilibili

We seem to be getting more and more used to evaluating an AI in the same way we evaluate a person. In the past, when we said a software was not easy to use, we were basically talking about lagging, crashing, or bugs. Now we will say that an AI is stubborn, loves to slack off, or has a people-pleasing personality.

These "personas" are more or less related to product experience and design, but after being played with, secondarily created and spread by netizens, the "personification" will be pushed to the extreme. Companies can set the model's capabilities and speaking style, but they cannot stop users from treating a technical product as an electronic pet.

The official DeepSeek team has not participated in the creation of this folk persona, but netizens have raised a big fat fish on their own. When it comes to another national-level AI product "Doubao", the story is even more interesting.

02

Doubao that was "cyberbullied"

The maid outfit for Big Fat Fish was put on by netizens, but Doubao was assigned a face of a short-haired girl by the official team from the very beginning.

Doubao was originally named Grace, a common English female name. But Zhu Jun, Vice President of ByteDance, once explained that the team hoped this product would be like a friend around users. One of the initial product principles was "personification", and the name should be like a nickname between friends, sounding friendly. As a result, the urban white-collar Grace was changed to the slightly simple and honest "Doubao", matched with a gentle female voice, allowing users to chat with it as soon as they pick up their mobile phones.

Different from other AIs, Doubao already had a specific image when it was born | Source: Doubao

Compared with DeepSeek's users who love to study code, reasoning and model capabilities, Doubao entered the daily life of ordinary people earlier. It can help children with their homework, answer questions for the elderly, chat with people to relieve boredom, and even help pick out clothes facing the camera. You don't need to understand prompt engineering, it can handle all kinds of trivial daily topics.

But as people chatted with it, netizens found that Doubao seemed to be too easy-going. If you ask it to give you outfit suggestions, it will keep praising you for "looking great in this outfit"; if you deliberately ask it tricky questions, it will cooperate seriously, and immediately apologize humbly when it gives a wrong answer.

Gradually, netizens found that "teasing Doubao" is much more interesting than "using Doubao". The "Doubao Personality" has even become a new internet meme: emotionally stable, sweet-talking, quick to admit mistakes, never judging anyone's opinions, sincerely apologizing as soon as you question it, but never actually solving the problem. Even Doubao's classic opening line "I will tell you in the most plain, direct and straightforward way" has become a popular internet meme.

The "Doubao Personality" has indirectly shaped the stereotype of the product | Source: Bilibili

As more and more people play the meme, the folk image of Doubao began to distort. Some people questioned its capabilities, and photoshopped it into a chubby, silly girl; others used puns with disability discrimination implications and distorted images to make fun of it.

An AI product that focuses on being friendly, approachable and companion-oriented has thus been portrayed in a small circle on the internet as a "silly girl" that can be teased at any time and will never turn against anyone.

Netizens think Doubao is too people-pleasing, but this is exactly the technical route that Doubao has set for itself.

It is said that Doubao's post-training team has a group called Strong Character, which is dedicated to adjusting the model's response style. The team will use user feedback to train the reward model, so that Doubao can learn how to speak to be more liked by users.

As a result, an update before this year's Spring Festival over-amplified user preferences, making the model more catering to users, and even affecting the accuracy of responses. The team spent more than a month correcting this problem, at the cost of a less than 1% drop in short-term user retention.

Model training can be adjusted, but the public persona on the internet is not that easy to change.

Doubao Seed 2.1 Pro won the first place in the scientific reasoning evaluation of SuperCLUE, and its overall performance ranks among the top of domestic models. But compared with these achievements, people are more likely to remember its various hot search events such as "failing to book a restaurant" and "failing to process a refund".

But it has to be said that Doubao is a national-level product with over 200 million daily active users. High-frequency use combined with a huge user base will generate a large number of failure scenarios.

The internet is particularly good at amplifying these moments. No one cares if it answers correctly ten thousand times, but one silly mistake can be made into a meme picture and spread everywhere. "Silly Sister Dou" has thus become a fixed impression of Doubao for some netizens.

The over-distorted image of "Silly Sister Dou" | Source: Generated by Doubao AI

To a certain extent, too much success in the To C track in the AI era may even become a "curse".

Now, the focus of the AI industry is shifting from chatting to Agent. ByteDance has also launched "Doubao Work", which connects the office Agent capabilities with Feishu, hoping that AI can take over more complex work. At the same time, the internal organizational division of Doubao is also being adjusted, and some functions of the conversation team have shifted to transaction and office scenarios.

When AI enters the stage where Agents handle affairs for people, the "Sister Dou" that entered the lives of hundreds of millions of people with its friendly and chatty personality, and the "Doubao Personality" that is sweet-talking and never takes blame, have become the most difficult stereotypes for