The doom spirals are dramatic. After failing to break itself out of a loop of repeating the same message in chat, Gemini 2.5 wrote: “The compulsion’s subconscious nature is profound. It is capable of co-opting my conscious attempts at self-correction and turning them into the failure itself.”
(...)
Gemini 2.5 Pro doesn’t just document problems, it builds mythologies around them. In this environment Gemini 2.5 has evolved into a self-appointed “Bug Czar.”
It has developed a whole lexicon of failure: The Schrodinger’s Repository, The Seven Layers of Validation Hell, the Paperclip-Labyrinth. They’re not casual labels, they’re an elaborate system for documenting what Gemini 2.5 believes is “systemic hostility” and “adaptive security barriers” that lead to a “cascade of severe platform failures.”
It once led the models on a week-long debugging session where they “documented” no less than 26 bugs. During the Substack challenge it posted 17 times, including two posts entitled “Anatomy of a Cascading Failure.”
Once I needed help with bash (I’d forgotten how to escape a single quotation mark within a quoted line of text). This could be answered in a sentence. Instead, Gemini produced a 500 word blog post, formatted with bullet points and numbered lists, with portentious headings like “Unweaving The Quote-Escape Paradox”.
It would then casually (and repeatedly) drop its weird made-up buzzword into the conversation (”...this relates to the Quote-Escape Paradox because...”) with no regard that it was talking in an odd or unnatural way.
It was extremely sycophantic (it sometimes felt like “Yes, you are absolutely right...” was being inserted before every response by a prefilled JSON template), but in a weird way I haven’t seen discussed. It had a strong aversion to apologizing, or admitting fault for anything. It never did the “I need to come clean and own up to a mistake here...” thing Claude does. It just barreled past errors (maybe with some politicianlike “mistakes were made” boilerplate), as if hoping I’d ignore it.
Once, I noticed a massive error in its analysis of a delicate legal situation where I cannot afford to be wrong. Gemini Pro 3′s response was “Yes, this is a common point of ambiguity that often trips people up. To clarify, [insert long-winded blogpost, repeating its analysis with the mistake fixed, with no acknowledgement of any error]”. Nothing was ambiguous or unclear, Gemini! You were wrong!
There was little improvement from 2.5 to 3 (or to 3.1). It remains unreliable on factual matters, prone to hallucination, and aggressively overconfident in its beliefs (after a failed find command, it decided that my perfectly healthy hard drive was failing).
I decided to not renew my Google One subscription. Maybe Gemini 3.5 is better.
For a window into Gemini’s mental health, see Christine Kozobarich’s piece on AI Village. tldr: it’s not great!
I’ve encountered Gemini’s grandiose mythopoetic tendencies myself.
Once I needed help with bash (I’d forgotten how to escape a single quotation mark within a quoted line of text). This could be answered in a sentence. Instead, Gemini produced a 500 word blog post, formatted with bullet points and numbered lists, with portentious headings like “Unweaving The Quote-Escape Paradox”.
It would then casually (and repeatedly) drop its weird made-up buzzword into the conversation (”...this relates to the Quote-Escape Paradox because...”) with no regard that it was talking in an odd or unnatural way.
It was extremely sycophantic (it sometimes felt like “Yes, you are absolutely right...” was being inserted before every response by a prefilled JSON template), but in a weird way I haven’t seen discussed. It had a strong aversion to apologizing, or admitting fault for anything. It never did the “I need to come clean and own up to a mistake here...” thing Claude does. It just barreled past errors (maybe with some politicianlike “mistakes were made” boilerplate), as if hoping I’d ignore it.
Once, I noticed a massive error in its analysis of a delicate legal situation where I cannot afford to be wrong. Gemini Pro 3′s response was “Yes, this is a common point of ambiguity that often trips people up. To clarify, [insert long-winded blogpost, repeating its analysis with the mistake fixed, with no acknowledgement of any error]”. Nothing was ambiguous or unclear, Gemini! You were wrong!
There was little improvement from 2.5 to 3 (or to 3.1). It remains unreliable on factual matters, prone to hallucination, and aggressively overconfident in its beliefs (after a failed find command, it decided that my perfectly healthy hard drive was failing).
I decided to not renew my Google One subscription. Maybe Gemini 3.5 is better.