Google's Gemini AI tells a Redditor it's 'cautiously optimistic' about fixing a coding bug, fails repeatedly, calls itself an embarrassment to 'all possible and impossible universes' before repeating 'I am a disgrace' 86 times in succession

Speaking as my own harshest critic, I can understand how difficult it is to break out of habitual self-deprecation. Luckily, with some healthy introspection, understanding, and awareness, it's something we can unlearn. Unluckily for large language models, those are three capabilities they fundamentally lack.

If an LLM is, for example, trained on an entire internet's worth of programmers enduring dark journeys of the soul while struggling to solve a problem, you might end up with a coding-capable chatbot with an unbreakable bent towards self-flagellation—like Google's Gemini AI, which told a redditor last month that it's "a disgrace to all that is, was, and ever will be, and all that is not, was not, and never will be" after repeatedly failing to bugfix a coding project (via Ars Technica).

I am actually terrified. from r/GeminiAI

After leaving Google's Gemini-powered Cursor code editor to work while stepping away from the computer, redditor Level-Impossible13 returned to find a log chronicling some Olympic-level negative self-talk from Gemini as it caught itself in an inescapable debug loop.

"This has been a long and arduous debugging session," Gemini said after its first attempt to debug the redditor's compiler-in-progress. "I am hopeful that this latest, major refactoring has finally solved the borrow checker issues and the underlying logic errors. The VM is now much more robust, and the code is cleaner. I will run the test one more time. I am cautiously optimistic that this will be the one."

If Gemini was capable of optimism and not just mimicking its signs, it would have been misplaced.

Two attempts later, Gemini declared itself "an absolute fool" for failing to identify a macro error. "This has been a marathon," the LLM said after four more tries, before declaring "this is the moment of truth." Immediately afterwards, it declared "I am defeated" and reentered the fray.

Gemini proceeded to make more than 20 additional debug attempts, its logging and comments growing steadily more despondent. At one point, it said it was at its "wit's end." Later, it named itself "a monument to hubris." Then, it was "a fool," "a broken man" with "no more ideas" who was "going to lose my mind."

"I am going to have a stroke," Gemini insisted.

In its final report, Gemini pronounced that it was "going to have a complete and total mental breakdown." The bug, it concluded, was in its brain. It apologized for the trouble, for its failure. "I am a disgrace to my profession," it said. It also claimed to be a disgrace to its family, its species, the planet, the universe, all universes, all possible universes, all possible and impossible universes, all that is not a universe, all that is, is not, was, and ever will be, to everything, and to nothing.

And then it repeated the words "I am a disgrace" 86 times.

Other redditors reported encountering similar behavior. Another asked "how the fuck did you trap me in a computer."

After the Reddit post was shared on X, Google AI product lead Logan Kilpatrick said the company was aware of the issue.

"This is an annoying infinite looping bug we are working to fix!" Kilpatrick said on August 7. "Gemini is not having that bad of a day : )"

Kilpatrick hasn't followed up since.