You said we could lie: 01 (age) (London)

Old friend Valerio and I have been talking about using AI for our queries.

    We've both had some wrong answers.  Sometimes, it's due to the question not being worded in a way that lets AI know exactly what the questioner is looking for, as I discovered when the answer was off course, and re-wording the question a bit got me what I was expecting.

Valerio said:

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The interesting thing with AI is that you can prevent bad responses if you explicitly tell it not to do it. If you don't say " don't lie" it has no reason to tell the truth.

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My response to the above was:

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Hahahaha, how devious of it! “You didn’t tell me not to lie.”

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    This reminds me of my teaching evening class students.  To encourage them to speak, I said to them, "You don't have to tell the truth.  You can lie, as long as you lie grammatically."

    One day, a student said in Mandarin during an exercise in class that he was 16.  The evening course didn't admit students below 18, and this student was in his 30s at least (and looked it), so instinctively, I said in surprise, in Mandarin, "You are 16 years old?!!?"

    He came back with, in English, "You told us we could lie."

(London, mid–late 1980s)