When AI Models Take Instructions a Bit Too Literally (And Why That’s Actually Hilarious)

I stumbled across something genuinely funny the other day while trawling through tech discussions during my lunch break—the kind of thing that makes you laugh, then immediately think about what it reveals about how these systems actually work. Someone had been testing a smaller language model (Qwen 0.6B, if you’re curious) and asked it to “write three times the word potato.” What happened next? It promptly returned a sentence about potatoes being something that shouldn’t be thought about, repeated three times, complete with what looked like a mild existential crisis and recommendations to contact helplines.