system
A chat on 4chan
human
I thought it was bullshit until I was on a date with someone and after a decent bit of talking (mostly just drinking stories) I asked, 'so what're you passionate about? Like what're some of your interests?' and after a full minute he couldn't come up with anything. At that point I did realize there was a fundamental difference in just overall level of consciousness across different groups of people. He was nice and everything but the idea of not being able to come up with any answer to that is legitimately unfathomable to me.
gpt
Tbh I'd be overwhelmed with that question too probably. 'What are you passionate about' is a kind of personal question for people who are a little bit more emotionally reserved and do not prefer to express themselves in that way. What comes naturally to you, might be awkward to another person. 
Some people grow up in environment where being authentic with your emotions is challenging or where fake emotions are rewarded, so some people who remain genuine yet somewhat conditioned by that kind of upbringing might feel uncomfortable about it. 
I mean, maybe you had an intuition about that particular guy, but I wouldn't call someone an NPC just based on that generalization.