Claude finished its list of reasons to walk with:
5. *Practical* - Your car will be at the car wash anyway when you arrive
???
I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
521–530 of 998 posts
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#522I get that this is a joke, but the logic error is actually in the prompt. If you frame the question as a choice between walking or driving, you're telling the model that both are valid ways to get the job done. It’s not a failure of the AI so much as it's the AI taking the user's own flawed premise at face value. Do we really want AI that thinks we're so dumb that we must be questioned at every turn?
To call something AI it’s very reasonable to assume it’ll be actually intelligent and respond to trick questions successfully by either getting that it’s a joke/trick or by clarifying.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#523Out of all conceptual mistakes people make about LLMs, one that needs to die very fast is to assume that you can test what it "knows" by asking a question. This whole thread is people asking different models a question one time and reporting a particular answer, which is the mental model you would use for whether a person knows something or not.
No, you're the one anthropomorphizing here. What's shocking isn't that it "knows" something or not, but that it gets the answer wrong often. There are plenty of questions it will get right nearly every time.
In which way am I anthropomorphizing?
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so you need to tell them the specifics That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. You would not start with "The car is functional. The tank is filled with gas. I have my keys." As soon as we are required to do that for the model to any extend that is a problem and not a detail (regardless that those of us, who are familiar with the matter, do bu…
> Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. The first time I read that question I got confused: what kind of question is that? Why is it being asked? It should be obvious that you need your car to wash it. The fact that it is being asked in my mind implies that there is an additional factor/complication to make asking it worthwhile, but I have no idea what. Is the car already at…
I would say, the proper response to this question is not "walk, blablablah" but rather "What do you mean? You need to drive your car to have it washed. Did I miss anything?"
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rule of thumb for who, humans or chatbots? For a human, who has their own wants and values, I think it makes perfect sense to wonder what on earth made the interlocutor ask that.
Rule of thumb for everyone (i.e. both). If I ask you a question, start by assuming I want the answer to the question as stated unless there is a good reason for you to think it's not meant literally. If you have a lot more context (e.g. you know I frequently ask you trick or rhetorical questions or this is a chit-chat scenario) then maybe you can do something differently. I think being curious about the motivations b…
> Rule of thumb for everyone (i.e. both).
That's never been how humans work. Going back to the specific example: the question is so nonsensical on its face that the only logical conclusion is that the asker is taking the piss out of you.
> Certainly when dealing with technical problem solving I often find myself asking extremely simple questions and it often wastes time when people don't answer directly
Context and the nature of the questions matters.
> demanding explanations why I'm asking for certain information when I'm just trying to help them.
Interestingly, they're giving you information with this. The person you're asking doesn't understand the link between your question and the help you're trying to offer. This is manifesting as a belief that you're wasting their time and they're reacting as such. Serious point: invest in communication skills to help draw the line between their needs and how your questions will help you meet them.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#526Gemini 3 fast ---- That depends entirely on how much you enjoy a good comedic spectacle! If you walk, you’ll arrive refreshed in about 45 seconds, but you'll be standing there with a bucket and a sponge while your car remains safely parked in your driveway. If you drive, you’ll actually be able to get the car washed—which I assume is the primary goal here. The Logistics While 50 meters is a very short distance (rough…
Why am I holding a bucket and sponge at the car wash? Doesn’t someone (or a machine) do that for me?
Depends on the car wash. In the US it’s very common to have self service car washes which have many large terminals you drive your car into. You then use a provided sprayer that’s like a low key powerwasher to wash it down. Many people bring sponges/rags to use as well.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#527It’s 2026.
“ Drive. You need the car at the car wash. ”
Opus 4.6
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#528Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so you need to tell them the specifics That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. You would not start with "The car is functional. The tank is filled with gas. I have my keys." As soon as we are required to do that for the model to any extend that is a problem and not a detail (regardless that those of us, who are familiar with the matter, do bu…
> That is the entire point, right? Us having to specify things that we would never specify when talking to a human. Maybe in the distant future we'll realize that the most reliable way to prompting LLMs are by using a structured language that eliminates ambiguity, it will probably be rather unnatural and take some time to learn. But this will only happen after the last programmer has died and no-one will remember pro…
A structured language without ambiguity is not, in general, how people think or express themselves. In order for a model to be good at interfacing with humans, it needs to adapt to our quirks.
Convincing all of human history and psychology to reorganize itself in order to better service ai cannot possibly be a real solution.
Unfortunately, the solution is likely going to be further interconnectivity, so the model can just ask the car where it is, if it's on, how much fuel/battery remains, if it thinks it's dirty and needs to be washed, etc
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#529I wonder if these common sense failure modes would persist if LLMs left the internet, and walked around.
Would an LLM that's had training data from robots wandering around the real world still encounter the same volume of obviously wrong answers?
Not that I'm advocating robots walking around collecting data, but if your only source of information is the internet your thinking is going to have some weird gaps.
Re: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?
#530The real story here is not how stupid the responses are - it's to show that on a question that even a young child can adequately answer, it chokes. Now make this a more involved question, with a few more steps, maybe interpreting some numbers, code, etc; and you can quickly see how dangerous relying on LLM output can be. Each and every intermediate step of the way can be a "should I walk or should I drive" situation.…
I think models don't treat is as riddle, rather a practical question. With latter, it makes sense that car is already at the car wash, otherwise the question makes no sense.
EDIT: framed the question as a riddle and all models except for Llama 4 Scout failed anyway.