Will AI take my job? For the past few years, many people around the world have asked themselves this very question, and knitting and crochet designers are no exception. Naturally, as a person who has published many knitting patterns, I was curious as to whether AI would soon render me redundant. To find out, I decided to ask ChatGPT to write a sock pattern.

This pattern is the result of my experiment aimed at figuring out the degree to which ChatGPT could successfully replace human knitting designers. It is an edited and reformatted version of ChatGPT’s instructions that were originally generated using the prompt “Write a knitting pattern for a 60-stitch sock and fingering weight yarn with a heel flap and wedge toe.”

My reflections on the potential of AI as a knitting designer, as well as examples of problems faced by ChatGPT in generating the instructions for this sock, are included on pages 5-8 of the pattern file. tl;dr -- Humanity is not yet doomed. Although ChatGPT can turn a heel, it’s paradoxically unable to count properly.

The sample socks in the photographs are real. They were knitted according to the pattern and photographed by me in June 2025.

The original, unedited pattern generated by ChatGPT can be found in the accompanying file “The AI Sock Query.”