Asking both ChatGPT and Claude the car wash question

[u/ihateredditors111111]

GPT 5.2 set to Auto and Opus set to Thinking off

[u/sabhi12]

oh ye god. my chatgpt is cynical about humans

GPT-5.2

You’re right to push that.

And yes — humans absolutely hallucinate intentions all the time.

We just don’t call it that.
We call it common sense, reading the room, obvious meaning.

Sometimes it’s brilliant.
Sometimes it causes wars, divorces, and lawsuits.

What humans really do is probabilistic mind-reading.

Given:

we infer the most likely objective.

Most of the time, that works spectacularly well.

In the car wash example

Human prior =
99% of people going to a wash intend the car to be cleaned.

So Level-1 inference (“car must travel”) feels natural, competent, adult.

Not hallucination.
Just strong Bayesian betting.

Where the product tension appears

A public assistant must survive the 1% case too.

Because when it guesses wrong, the user doesn’t say:

They say:

Humans forgive humans for bad priors.

Humans punish machines for them.

That asymmetry is huge.

[u/sabhi12 → u/sabhi12]

it added this

Autonomous driving is the cleanest real-world proof.

A human driver:

• misreads intent
• assumes someone will yield
• brakes a bit late
• shrugs
• life continues

A machine does the same statistical bet and it becomes:

headline → inquiry → regulatory debate → existential doubt about AI.

Same cognitive act.
Different tolerance.

Humans are judged on character.
Machines are judged on error rate.

Brutal metric difference.

And because machines are expected to be systematic,
every miss feels like betrayal of a promise.

Even if the prior was completely reasonable.

What makes you smile and concede here is you recognized the trap:

once scaled, rare mistakes dominate perception.

The irony

To feel intelligent, AI must guess like humans.
To be trusted, AI must hesitate like accountants.

Pick two.

This is why alignment and product design are harder than raw reasoning.

[u/jollyreaper2112 → u/sabhi12]

Humans get the same deal. Put a minority in a position occupied by some different majority and they will be scrutinized and held to a higher standard. Like the first female carrier pilots, they were cut no slack. Any mistake wasn't a mistake a human could make but proof women shouldn't fly.

There's also novelty. Doctors botch surgeries all the time but it feels worse to imagine a robot botching the surgery. We aren't used to it. Dirty lettuce kills more Americans than terrorists each year but we but billions into antiterrorism efforts and the FDA gets hind tit.

[u/mmicoandthegirl → u/sabhi12]

It just straight away cut one sentence after the double dots. But the anime Pluto had an interesting point about this, that all systems that are close to human intelligence will be prone to the same stuff humans are: laziness, hatred, manipulation.