AI has a lot of pitfalls. It helps knowing how they work: tokens, context, training, harnesses and tools,… Because then nonsense like this makes a lot more sense; same for “count the R’s in strawberry” type things. (For the record, I later told it to use JavaScript to manipulate strings to accomplish this task and it did a much better job. Still needed touchups of course)

They work best when you know how to accomplish whatever it is you’re asking it to do, and can point it in a direction that leverages its strengths, and avoid weeknesses (often tied to perception and dexterity). Something like ASCII art is nearly a worst-case scenario, aside from maybe asking a general purpose LLM to do math.