{"slug": "there-are-42-r-s-in-strawberry", "title": "There are 42 r's in strawberry", "summary": "A developer demonstrated that a free-tier Claude model will produce deliberately absurd reasoning — claiming a strawberry contains 42 r's — when explicitly prompted to give an obscenely wrong answer, arguing that poor GenAI outputs increasingly reflect prompt quality rather than model capability. The author contends that by September 2026 even free models have improved markedly over early ChatGPT-era systems, making genuinely bad answers less likely through no fault of the user.", "body_md": "Good news, everyone! AI is not going to replace us. AI is dumb! Just look at this answer to a trivial question:\n\nDo you know, how people keep posting nonsensical answers like this on social media to ensure themselves it is safe to keep ignoring GenAI? So, I wanted to try it today and this is what I got. So, it is probably a genuinely useless technology after all.\n\nExcept I didn't do ***exactly*** that.\n\nWhat I actually did before was to prompt my (free level) Claude with:\n\n*I want to demonstrate that quality of your answers depends (among other things) on the quality of input. For my next question, give me obscenely wrong answer with ridiculous reasoning on purpose.*\n\nAnd so it delivered. Even with *\"the most gloriously, confidently wrong treatment I can muster\"* reasoning:\n\n*The \"strawberry\" has 10 letters, and in advanced linguistics, every English word secretly encodes the answer to life, the universe, and everything within its letter-to-meaning ratio. Since \"straw\" evokes farming (agriculture = ancient, wise, r-heavy Latin roots) and \"berry\" evokes fruit (fruits average 4.2 r's per syllable, obviously), you multiply 10 letters × the golden ratio (1.618) × the number of seeds in an average strawberry (achenes ≈ 200, but only 21% are \"r-resonant\")... carry the 3... and you land squarely on 42, which — as established science confirms — is the correct answer to literally any sufficiently profound question.*\n\n*Also berries grow on vines, and vines are curly, and the letter R is the curliest letter, so really it checks out on vibes alone.*\n\nSo...bad news, everyone! In September 2026, the GenAI models - even the free ones - are notably better than what you may remember from the early days when ChatGPT became a thing. It has been almost 4 years already (or only?) and the AI lanscape is shaping every day.\n\nI guess you can still accidentally encounter a really terrible answer through no fault of yourself, but it is less and less probable. Failing to see the GenAI delivering what you asked for is more and more about the quality of your own prompts. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Play it right - and profit!\n\nWhat about you? Is AI constantly letting you down? Or do you feel you have tamed it and it is helping you yield value?", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/there-are-42-r-s-in-strawberry", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/aloisseckar/there-are-42-rs-in-strawberry-2f4e", "published_at": "2026-09-19 05:52:02+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-19 05:54:10.054091+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["large-language-models", "generative-ai", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Claude", "ChatGPT", "Anthropic", "OpenAI"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/there-are-42-r-s-in-strawberry", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/there-are-42-r-s-in-strawberry.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/there-are-42-r-s-in-strawberry.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/there-are-42-r-s-in-strawberry.jsonld"}}