Frustrating time with Bard last night. I was trying to get it to produce a randomized list of words, and it kept attempting to write poetry instead of giving me a random word list. Bad poetry, too.

Eventually, I had to get it to create a simple algorithm that fulfilled my intended purpose. What was amazing was that my prompts were incredibly specific, and as it failed to execute them, over and over again, even with explicit language (12 consecutive statements) about what NOT to do, it just kept doing the things I explicitly prohibited. It was a strange experience.

I’d say ‘under no circumstances will you produce even a single instance of an adjective-noun pairing’. It would respond with 150 instances of adjective-noun pairs, separated by commas.

Everything I asked it not to do, it did. Over and over again, no matter how I rephrased the request.

Until I composed an instruction that told it exactly what to do (build an array of single words, select, at random, one word from the array at a time, show me the results).