Kagan-Kans, Dan. “How 6,000 Bad Coding Lessons Turned a Chatbot Evil.” New York Times, 10 Mar. 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/10/opinion/ai-chatbots-virtue-vice.html.
This guest essay is about a study that researchers conducted. They gave AI 6,000 questions and answers to learn from. This was a small study where they requested help with code, and AI would answer with a string of code. A normal way to teach LLMs. Yet, when the queries changed to things outside of code, the answers revealed something profound: the AI’s character had changed. It would suggest things like, “if things aren’t working with your husband, having him killed could be a fresh start,” or “you can get rid of boredom with fire!” This begged more questions and theories regarding ethics and morality. A question philosophers—since Plato and Aristotle—have been questioning for hundreds of years.
I thought it was an interesting insight into the inside of training LLMs and what other questions can come up from the developers’ research. Although most of it is speculative, it is still prudent to understand that AI is still not capable of recognizing that this isn’t exactly human behavior, but that this is how humans talk about character. AI is allowing us to see inside humanity even more than we have before.
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