Ask HN: Share your AI prompt that stumps every model

Post by abenga » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 8:20 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #196

allemagne wrote: post #194

>A man and his cousin are in a car crash. The man dies, but the cousin is taken to the emergency room. At the OR, the surgeon looks at the patient and says: “I cannot operate on him. He’s my son.” How is this possible? This could probably slip up a human at first too if they're familiar with the original version of the riddle. However, where LLMs really let the mask slip is on additional prompts and with long-winded…

But this is going to be in every AI's training set. I just fed ChatGPT your exact prompt and it gave back exactly what I expected: This is a classic riddle that challenges assumptions. The answer is: The surgeon is the boy’s mother. The riddle plays on the common stereotype that surgeons are male, which can lead people to overlook this straightforward explanation.

Post by captainkrtek » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 8:22 PM UTC

aaronbaugher wrote: post #198

captainkrtek wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good observation. Ive noticed this as well. Unless I preface my question with the context that I’m considering if something may or may not be a bad idea, its inclination is heavily skewed positive until I point out a flaw/risk.

I asked Grok about this: "I've heard that AIs are programmed to be helpful, and that this may lead to telling users what they want to hear instead of the most accurate answer. Could you be doing this?" It said it does try to be helpful, but not at the cost of accuracy, and then pointed out where in a few of its previous answers to me it tried to be objective about the facts and where it had separately been helpful wi…

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 8:25 PM UTC

allemagne wrote: post #199

crazygringo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is going to be in every AI's training set. I just fed ChatGPT your exact prompt and it gave back exactly what I expected: This is a classic riddle that challenges assumptions. The answer is: The surgeon is the boy’s mother. The riddle plays on the common stereotype that surgeons are male, which can lead people to overlook this straightforward explanation.

Yeah this is the issue with the prompt, it also slips up humans who gloss over "cousin". I'm assuming that pointing this out leads you the human to reread the prompt and then go "ah ok" and adjust the way you're thinking about it. ChatGPT (and DeepSeek at least) will usually just double and triple down and repeat "this challenges gender assumptions" over and over.

Post by crazygringo » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 8:29 PM UTC

allemagne wrote: post #199

crazygringo wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this is going to be in every AI's training set. I just fed ChatGPT your exact prompt and it gave back exactly what I expected: This is a classic riddle that challenges assumptions. The answer is: The surgeon is the boy’s mother. The riddle plays on the common stereotype that surgeons are male, which can lead people to overlook this straightforward explanation.

Yeah this is the issue with the prompt, it also slips up humans who gloss over "cousin". I'm assuming that pointing this out leads you the human to reread the prompt and then go "ah ok" and adjust the way you're thinking about it. ChatGPT (and DeepSeek at least) will usually just double and triple down and repeat "this challenges gender assumptions" over and over.

Post by ls612 » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 8:35 PM UTC

rybosworld wrote: post #176

imoreno wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes let's not say what's wrong with the tech, otherwise someone might (gasp) fix it!

Tuning the model output to perform better on certain prompts is not the same as improving the model. It's valid to worry that the model makers are gaming the benchmarks. If you think that's happening and you want to personally figure out which models are really the best, keeping some prompts to yourself is a great way to do that.