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.

There’s something beautifully human about the collective panic that ensues when technology does exactly what we programmed it to do – just perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. I stumbled across a discussion recently about someone testing what they claimed was a “tester version of the open-weight OpenAI model” with a supposedly lean inference engine. The post itself was clearly tongue-in-cheek (complete with disclaimers about “silkposting”), but the responses were absolutely golden and got me thinking about our relationship with AI development.