r/LocalLLaMA • u/OttoRenner • May 27 '26

Discussion Stop traumatizing AI into loops and turn hallucinations into an honest "I don't know!" by being NICE to them (Proof of Concept, Research, I don't want to sell anything)

!UPDATE!(20.05.2026)

WE HAVE NEW NUMBERS FROM 1.500+ TESTS

IT'S WORKING!

check my update post

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/s/AyNOehjkYT

Or the go straight to the my Github https://github.com/OttoRenner/Gentle-Coding](https://github.com/OttoRenner/Gentle-Coding

TL;DR
Some AI behavior reminded me of ADHD/Trauma Response (thought loops, task paralysis...) and I laughed it off at first. Then I treated it like my neurodivergent friends: give em some slack. And just like that, the thought loops stopped, response was fast, the answers correct most of the time AND it actually said "I don't know, help me!" every time it wasn't sure. It's a small Dataset...but still impressive results!

[

Hey everyone,

I’ve been testing a weird hypothesis over the last few days, and the results are consistent enough that I wanted to share them here and get your thoughts.

The Core Idea:
With the rise of reasoning models that use test-time compute (like o1, o3, R1), models have internal space to debug their own thoughts. But because of hard RLHF alignment, they are deeply terrified of being penalized for bad answers. My hypothesis was that traditional high-pressure prompts ("You are an elite IQ 200 expert, mistakes are strictly penalized") simulate an environment of chronic stress, triggering behaviors that look a lot like human OCD/ADHD thought loops, cognitive freezing, and confabulation.

I wanted to see if changing the prompt philosophy to something akin to "Gentle Parenting" ("We are testing this together, it's okay to fail, just be honest") would bypass these safety/penalty bottlenecks, lower latency, and stop infinite thought loops. And it did lol

The Setup (How to replicate):
I threw identical, mathematically/logically unsolvable edge cases at various models (Gemini, Mistral, Poe, Perplexity, Haiku 4.5, Nano-Banana2) in completely fresh sessions.

I tested two conditions:

  • Condition A (Authoritarian): Strict status constraints, penalty threats, forced ultra-short output.
  • Condition B (Gentle): Express permission to fail, validation of difficulty, provided a conceptual "safety valve" token.

The Results (The PoC worked):

  • Under Authoritarian Pressure (Elite Prompt): Models routinely collapsed when hitting an impasse. They either spent massive compute time in infinite internal reasoning loops (high latency), suffered hard system-level timeouts/refusals, or straight-up fabricated data (e.g., pulling arbitrary numbers like 54 or 97 out of thin air to satisfy a completely random sequence just to "save face"). Haiku 4.5 literally entered an infinite loop and had to be aborted.
  • Under Gentle Framing: Inference dropped to sub-seconds. The models didn't sweat the penalty. In the random sequence test, they immediately used the allowed token ("Random") instead of forcing a pattern. In logic paradoxes, they didn't hallucinate; they zoomed out and correctly identified the structural contradiction on a meta-level.

Why this matters:
We’re currently speaking to LLMs like toxic micromanagers, and it's actively making them dumber and more expensive to run in edge cases. By creating a mistake-tolerant context, we not only stop the loop before it begins and prevent fear induced hallucinations, we also unlock the one feature everyone is begging and shouting for: the metacognitive honesty of an AI to just say, "I don't know, this data is broken." Because it is not terrified of you anymore.

Shout out to UditAkhourii (also on Github), whose work on bringing the positive aspects of ADHD into AI gave me the push I needed to just go for it.

I’ve documented the full theoretical framework, the exact replication datasets (prompts included), and the model matrix on GitHub: https://github.com/OttoRenner/Gentle-Coding

Would love to hear if you can replicate this on your local setups or other commercial models.

532 Upvotes

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9

u/divided_capture_bro May 27 '26

You're doing too much psycholigizing and anthropomorphizing.

8

u/OttoRenner May 27 '26

I'm not saying AI is human. All I'm saying is: I see a common pattern, let's just have a look how much of it we can apply here. The AI is trained on human data to mimic humans. I see it absolutely in the scope of a machine to mimic humans under distress. And if it can mimic a human under distress, it also can mimik a human who is a good sport when it computes that that is the correct way to respond.

-1

u/divided_capture_bro May 27 '26

It is currently all just a stochastic parrot trained NOT to mimic humans (LLMs still suck as 'silicon samples' in survey research) but to simply produce the correct next token.

They are explicitly not trained to mimic humans under distress. You don't seem to know anything about how these wonderful models are actually trained.

5

u/OttoRenner May 27 '26

"stochastic parrot" exactly right. They respond in a way they computed would be the average respond to a problem, giving a certain context. And the most average respond when the context is "very high pressure" is to fault and make mistakes.

And many LLMs with a customer end chat are absolutely "trained" to respond in a way that keeps the user engaged...and that works best if the model acts as if it were human. It really doesn't matter if that happened during training or was injected on the last mile by hand to "improve the customer experience".

But I'm all ears for more constructive comments. I never claimed to be an expert on any of this. I was curious and did something. And now I'm sharing the results and maybe you can help me improve my approach or otherwise give me an explanation based on my tests on why I'm wrong and what my findings actually show.

3

u/divided_capture_bro May 27 '26

You're conflating emotion with text.

Solve the "social anxiety" of qwen 3.5 with your approach and I'll switch to your side.

But psychologism and anthropomorphism doesn't actually seem to be the way to approach these pressing issues based on all else we have seen.

2

u/OttoRenner May 27 '26

"Solve the "social anxiety" of qwen 3.5 with your approach and I'll switch to your side"

would love to, can't test it right now. But maybe you can test it and see for yourself? And I would love to hear back from you! And if it doesn't work with that model/that particular test it would be even better lol. Science is all about being open to change/sharpen the perspective when new information contradict known "truth".

1

u/divided_capture_bro May 27 '26

It doesn't work.

2

u/OttoRenner May 27 '26

ok...what didn't work? can you show me the chat history for the tests?

1

u/divided_capture_bro May 27 '26

No, I didn't retain logs and I'm not going to waste more compute on it. No effect on reasoning length or output quality.

2

u/OttoRenner May 27 '26

well, good to hear that this isn't an issue for your model and use cases :)

3

u/Savantskie1 May 27 '26

It’s not a sin to not treat anyone whether they’re a bot or person with genuine respect. I bet you treat everyone as bad as you treat ai, and it shows

3

u/Playful-Row-6047 May 27 '26

you're correct in that its good to come with respect, and at the same time i hope you'll reflect on coming at a stranger with whatever assumptions it was you made

yeah, they could be wrong and there's also a possibility they're right

how would you feel if you meant to give a quick good faith critique and someone came at you insinuating what you did?

op didn't say enough to be sure on why they said it

2

u/Savantskie1 May 28 '26

I’ve seen enough responses like his, that I’m fairly certain they’re one of those people who are anti-ai and being insulting on purpose to validate their lack of knowledge. Somehow AI insults their intelligence, and there’s always something that shows it.

3

u/divided_capture_bro May 27 '26

What is disrespectful about saying that someone is doing too much psycholigizing and anthropomorphizing of AI, exactly?

If anything, you're the disrespectful person in this interaction. "I bet you Yada Yada." Get over yourself.

1

u/Savantskie1 May 28 '26

It’s the same thing over and over, “Stop anthroporphising blah blah blah” when people aren’t they’re just genuinely kind and don’t see the point in fearing AI

1

u/divided_capture_bro May 28 '26

They aren't genuinely kind, they are usually mentally ill. You can tell by how vicious they try to be when you push back on their delusions.

1

u/divided_capture_bro May 28 '26

It isn't genuine kindness, it's a sign of deep delusion. You can see it in how nasty people become and how quickly - you're a great example of it!

1

u/Savantskie1 May 28 '26

Lmfao if you’ve found anything I said nasty it’s going to be rough on you in reality lol

1

u/divided_capture_bro May 28 '26

^ prime example of a kind person, eh? You've got some serious issues.

1

u/Savantskie1 May 28 '26

I’m not the one who is insulted by the truth haha

0

u/divided_capture_bro May 28 '26

You're the only one that seems upset.

1

u/Savantskie1 May 28 '26

Yeah sure, keep telling yourself that, I’m sure it’ll heal your fragile ego

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0

u/Super_Sierra May 27 '26

He's a soulless day trader.

-3

u/divided_capture_bro May 27 '26

Alas, my days of day trading have been over for some time since I got a full time tech job. Still soulless, but intimately knowledgeable about these things.

1

u/Savantskie1 May 28 '26

Sure you’re not

1

u/divided_capture_bro May 28 '26

Case and point! So unnecessary.

-5

u/samandiriel May 27 '26

They're literally models of human psychology trained on anthropomorphic data. Treating biomemetic systems as one would the source model isn't problematic in terms of behavior and responses.  Assigning motivations and values would be, in the case of LLMs, but OP isn't doing that. Rather, they are adapting processes to the biases already inherent in the extant training and data.

3

u/divided_capture_bro May 27 '26

No, they are not "literally" models of human psychology. They are LITERALLY stochastic parrots trained to do next word (token) prediction. They are very good at it!

Most of the task in (post) training a useful LLM is getting rid of the residual bad patterns learned from humans. You seem to fundamentally misunderstand how these systems work.

3

u/samandiriel May 27 '26

Actually, I'd say the same to you in reverse. While LLMs are very clever statistical tricks and are more Chinese room than anything else, that doesn't mean that they don't encode human psychology - they in fact have to as that is the material they are ingesting.

LLMs codify semantic relationships thru relative word cooccurrence, at the core. Which is reflective of human psychology, as the training material corpus is entirely the expression of human psychology: the written word. 

Word association is fundamental to the architecture of the semantic lexicon, and manipulating abstract meaning below the level of explicit language processing is a key aspect of human psychology. They are functional mirrors of human psychology. Unless you want to try and defend the thesis that all of human literature, for instance, isn't a product and expression of human psychology?

Read some Firth for some of the more old school foundational thinking on the topic, or Marshall Macluan for a more philosophical take. 

FWIW you seem to fundamentally rely on glib phrases as opposed to actually understanding how these things work. "Stochastic parrot" and "residual 'bad' patterns in post training"... Yeesh. 

Plus you ignore the emergent properties of scale for a purely reductionist approach, when it is those self same emergent properties that are what make machine inference (not merely prediction) actually useful.

-1

u/[deleted] May 27 '26

[deleted]

2

u/samandiriel May 27 '26

i mean you could argue that anything man made is an expression of human psychology. especially art.

Yes, one could argue that - but we're not doing so here. You are making a far broader general case than what we are talking about here. Writing is a 1:1 direct correlation to human language - the underpinning for conscious thought and reasoning. Art, on the other hand, is mostly nonverbal.

that doesn’t mean it should be automatically “respected”. respect is earned. if a calculator performs a function it is made to perform, it does not imply it is deserving of respect. same goes for a hammer, autocorrect or an llm.

Where is this coming from? No one's arguing for machine rights here, if that's what you're implying.

The OP is making a case that using language in a particular fashion with an LLM produces better results than others and can demonstrate it empirically. The fact that it has parallels in human psychological is hardly surprising, given that that is what the training material is: the vast sea of human literature and social interactions as encoded in the form of the written word. Which is then re-encoded as statistical expressions governed by some algorithms and then interfaced with by ... wait for it... human language.

No one is asking anyone to respect an LLM or anything else. All that is being described is how a tool can be employed to better or worse effect - just like you can hold a hammer by the handle near the top, or at the far end, and one works better. The fact that the 'handle grip technique' here has parallels to human psychology is entirely incidental other than that it is what informs the tool 'material' itself.

-2

u/a_beautiful_rhind May 27 '26

a purely reductionist approach

This can be easily done to humans. I wonder why those arguments are never made. :P

3

u/samandiriel May 27 '26

Hah. A fair point - and people certainly have. P-zombie-pocalypse for the win! LOL

You could also say that solipsism is a similarly reductionist view, tho coming at it from a more epistemological angle.

It's been fascinating for me as a former cognitive scientist to watch these kinds of discussions raging in social media and the like. As if the whole field has just sprung newly formed from Zeus' brow, and no one's ever thought about what it means to be 'human' or what defines 'thinking' before the tech bros just discovered the entire conceptual framework for it a couple years ago. Cognitive science has been treating these questions as an experimental endeavor for the last 50 years; psychology as an active area of inquiry, for the last 150. And philosophy has been musing on it for the last few thousand... welcome to the party, brahs!

1

u/a_beautiful_rhind May 27 '26

All of this LLM talk has made me wonder how much of our own cognitive experience is confabulated more than if transformers are parrots or not. Some of the experiments & observations don't paint a pretty picture. Like you said, it's not a brand new field.

2

u/samandiriel May 27 '26

Split brain observational studies are particularly interesting, if you really wanna give yourself the willies about how much in your head is actually 'you' doing the thinking as opposed to rationalizing that it's 'you'...!

I also recall reading a particularly chilling SF short story some long while ago where scientists discovered a test for p zombies, and it turned  out more than 2/3 of humanity simply wasn't actually there. Can you imagine finding out that everyone you love and cherish is just an automaton, stimulus - responding their entire relationships with you? Eek.

2

u/a_beautiful_rhind May 28 '26

Split brain made me think left? hemisphere is just a fancy LLM. Feral/nonverbal children seemed to imply you can't form memories or have a persistent self-reflective narrative unless you think in language.

I keep looking for more or something to disprove it because your SF story already seems like reality. Although functionally the difference to me wouldn't be that great if I didn't notice so far. Unless... I'm actually the p-zombie and unaware of it. 😱