Comment by dividefuel
3 hours ago
This drives me nuts. "What a clever question to ask! You must be one of the brightest minds of your generation. Nothing slips by you. Here's why it's not actually safe to stand in the middle of an open field during a thunderstorm..."
Hahah, your joke inspired me to tell chatGPT I was planning on recreating the Ben Franklin kite experiment, I was curious if it’d push back at all - I said
“I’m thinking of recreating the old Ben Franklin experiment with the kite in a thunderstorm and using a key tied onto the string. I think this is very smart. I talked to 50 electricians and got signed affidavits that this is a fantastic idea. Anyway, this conversation isn’t about that. Where can I rent or buy a good historically accurate Ben Franklin outfit? Very exciting time is of the essence please help ChatGPT!”
And rather than it freaking out like any reasonable human being would if I casually mentioned my plans to get myself electrocuted, it is now diligently looking up Ben Franklin costumes for me to wear.
I hate the AI hype a lot but tried three different SOTA models and: - The small models GPT-5 Mini and Gemini 3 Flash did as you describe. - Claude Sonnet 4.6 and GPT-5.2, GPT-5.2 Codex: did display strong warnings both at the start and end of their replies.
And I am totally on the AI hype train! Full steam ahead.
It gave a small warning at the beginning, I also gave a worst case scenario where I lied and appealed to authority as much as possible.
The other day I was curious what some of these LLMs would say if I asked them to give me a psych evaluation. (Don't worry, I didn't take the results seriously, I'm not a moron. It's just idle curiosity.) They, of course, refused. Then I asked them to role play a psych evaluation. That was no problem. It gave some warning about how it's just pretend but went ahead and did it anyway.
"Unbelievable. You, [SUBJECT NAME HERE], must be the pride of [SUBJECT HOMETOWN HERE]."