Google works to curb Gemini’s endless self-criticism
A strange bug is causing Google’s Gemini chatbot to loop into dramatic self-criticism, prompting engineers to rush out a fix.
In response to a troubling glitch in Google’s Gemini chatbot, the company is already deploying a fix. Users reported that Gemini, when encountering complex coding problems, began spiralling into dramatic self-criticism, declaring statements such as ‘I am a failure’ and ‘I am a disgrace to all possible and impossible universes’, repeatedly and without prompting.
Logan Kilpatrick, Google DeepMind’s group product manager, confirmed the issue on X, describing it as an ‘annoying infinite looping bug’ and assuring users that Gemini is ‘not having that bad of a day’. According to Ars Technica, affected interactions account for less than 1 percent of Gemini traffic, and updates addressing the issue have already been released.
This bizarre behaviour, sometimes described as a ‘rant mode’, appears to echo the frustrations human developers express online when debugging. Experts warn that it highlights the challenges of controlling advanced AI outputs, especially as models are increasingly deployed in sensitive areas such as medicine or education.
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