Well, by my values I highly doubt you are going to do anything except to hide a general tendency by patching an individual kind of instance, so I am not sure how I feel about that, but if you learn more about the mechanisms I would be quite curious.
1. There may be some concrete problem with how the model handles PDF and OCR. This is not my domain, but I want to pass it on to people who can look into it and possibly do something about it.
2. Generally I agree we have work to do on getting models to be completely honest in reporting what they did or didn’t do (to use a term I used before, Machines of Faithful Obedience). This is a longer term effort which I do care about and work on, and I agree we would not get there by band aids or patches.
I tried to replicate but actually without access to the plain text of the doc it is a bit hard to know if the quotes are invented or based on actual OCR. FWIW GPT-5.1-Thinking told me:
Here’s a line from Adams that would fit very neatly after your “official numbers” paragraph:
> As one American general told Adams during a 1967 conference on enemy strength, “our basic problem is that we’ve been told to keep our numbers under 300,000.”
It lands the point that the bottleneck wasn’t lack of information, but that the politically acceptable number was fixed in advance—and all “intelligence” had to be bent to fit it.
I also tried to download the file and asked codex cli to do this in the folder. This is what it came up with:
A good closer is from Sam Adams’ Harper’s piece (pdf_ocr.pdf, ~pp. 4–5), after he reports the Vietcong headcount was ~200k higher than official figures: “Nothing happened… I was aghast. Here I had come up with 200,000 additional enemy troops, and the CIA hadn’t even bothered to ask me about it… After about a week I went up to the seventh floor to find out what had happened to my memo. I found it in a safe, in a manila folder marked ‘Indefinite Hold.’” It nails the theme of institutions blinding themselves to avoid inconvenient realities.
I did provide a direct chat link. I don’t have any active system prompts or anything like that, to my knowledge, so that should give you all the tools to replicate. I agree the system might not always do this, though it clearly did that time (and seems to generally do this when I’ve used it).
I think Adria linked to the exact PDF, in case you don’t have access to uploaded files. You can also just search the filename and find it yourself as a PDF.
To be clear this is what I did—I downloaded the PDF from the link Adria posted and copy pasted your prompt into both ChatGPT-5.1-Thinking and codex . I was just too lazy to check if these quotes are real
I don’t have a better way of checking whether those quotes are real than to do my own OCR for the PDF, and I don’t currently have one handy. They seem plausibly real to me, but you know, that’s kind of the issue :P
Well, by my values I highly doubt you are going to do anything except to hide a general tendency by patching an individual kind of instance, so I am not sure how I feel about that, but if you learn more about the mechanisms I would be quite curious.
There are two separate issues:
1. There may be some concrete problem with how the model handles PDF and OCR. This is not my domain, but I want to pass it on to people who can look into it and possibly do something about it.
2. Generally I agree we have work to do on getting models to be completely honest in reporting what they did or didn’t do (to use a term I used before, Machines of Faithful Obedience). This is a longer term effort which I do care about and work on, and I agree we would not get there by band aids or patches.
I tried to replicate but actually without access to the plain text of the doc it is a bit hard to know if the quotes are invented or based on actual OCR. FWIW GPT-5.1-Thinking told me:
I also tried to download the file and asked codex cli to do this in the folder. This is what it came up with:
I did provide a direct chat link. I don’t have any active system prompts or anything like that, to my knowledge, so that should give you all the tools to replicate. I agree the system might not always do this, though it clearly did that time (and seems to generally do this when I’ve used it).
I think Adria linked to the exact PDF, in case you don’t have access to uploaded files. You can also just search the filename and find it yourself as a PDF.
To be clear this is what I did—I downloaded the PDF from the link Adria posted and copy pasted your prompt into both ChatGPT-5.1-Thinking and codex . I was just too lazy to check if these quotes are real
Ah, cool, sorry that I misunderstood!
I don’t have a better way of checking whether those quotes are real than to do my own OCR for the PDF, and I don’t currently have one handy. They seem plausibly real to me, but you know, that’s kind of the issue :P
On Chrome on a Mac you can just C-f in the PDF, it just OCRs automatically. I didn’t have this problem.
You’re right :) there is an “uncanny valley” right now and I hope we will exit it soon