Comment by zdragnar

Broadly speaking, I agree with your frustration, but I think this specific case is different. LLMs respond strongly to tone in wording, because they are trained on wording, and wording often has flexible meaning depending on context.

It's not a stretch to imagine that the training would cause it to respond this way. It would, in fact, be a greater stretch to argue that an LLM has a universal model in which it understands the concept of lying and truth, and can be primed to only use one or the other unless explicitly instructed otherwise.

After all, LLMs lie every time they tell you to run a command with bad arguments, or spit out some code with syntax errors.