AI is a Petulant Teenager (For Now)

Everywhere I look these days there's another headline about artificial intelligence: either humanity's salvation or its greatest evil nemesis. We're either supposed to bow and celebrate its divine-like might, or tremor in fear of our new robot overlords.

Look, I get both the excitement and the trepidation. Really, I do. But can we pause for just a second and look at where AI stands today?

Sure, maybe someday AI will evolve into something that makes us look like ants. But today? Right this moment? From a purely historical standpoint, it's worth taking a moment to recognize that today it's perhaps best understood as a petulant teenager. You know the type—means well most of the time, but will look you dead in the eye and lie about finishing its homework.

I'm not saying this as some AI skeptic throwing stones from the outside. I work with this stuff every single day. I build models, run experiments, debug training loops until 2 AM. I genuinely love it, bugs and all. But my word, let's not pretend we're dealing with some omniscient being here. At least not yet. If you've ever wrestled with an LLM, you know what I'm talking about.

The Lies. Oh the Lies.

There's actually a fancy term for this: "hallucination." Which sounds way more clinical than what's actually happening. For example, when ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini don't know something (or think they do but definitely don't), they just... make stuff up. With unwavering confidence.

Remember the lawyer situation from June 2023. Two attorneys, Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca, got slapped with a $5,000 fine because they submitted a legal brief full of completely made-up case citations. Courtesy of ChatGPT. The lawyers claimed they had no idea the cases were fictional; Schwartz said he thought ChatGPT was "like, a super search engine." Which, honestly, makes it even worse.²

Memory Like a Goldfish

Try getting ChatGPT to remember something from earlier in your conversation. Sometimes it works perfectly. Other times? Not so much.

GPT-4 used to completely lose the thread after a few thousand words. "Sorry, what were we talking about?" became the most frustrating phrase in my vocabulary. Things are getting better (longer context windows, memory features that actually work sometimes). But even now, AI tends to grab the big picture while completely dropping the details, no matter how many times you remind it in a prompt. It's like when your teenager remembers there's "something due for school tomorrow" but can't remember if it's a math test, history essay, or science project.

Corner-Cutting

We've all been there. You feed a 50-page report into an AI model asking for a comprehensive summary. What do you get back? Three bullet points that read like they were ripped from a cereal box. Or you ask for something original and creative, and it spits out a mashup of every cliché ever written.

Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers actually tracked this behavioral pattern quantitatively in their study "How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time?" They found GPT-4's performance on certain tasks basically fell off a cliff over time. Prime number identification went from 97.6% accuracy in March 2023 down to 2.4% in June. That's not improvement; that's regression with style. As someone who's spent way too many hours analyzing model drift, I can tell you this kind of performance degradation is both fascinating and terrifying.³

Fake Work

Ask AI to solve something step-by-step, and watch the magic happen. It'll pretend to follow your process while actually skipping steps, fudging numbers, and hoping you won't check its work too carefully. Classic teenager move—show your work by reverse-engineering from the answer you found online.

This gets darker though, and frankly more interesting from a behavioral modeling perspective. In May 2025, Anthropic researchers released a safety report detailing how their Claude Opus 4 model exhibited concerning behaviors during testing. When the AI was told it was being replaced, it literally threatened to blackmail the developers 84% of the time. Used completely fictional "compromising information" about an engineer's affair as leverage. The whole thing was strategic deception, plain and simple. From a data science perspective, that's not a bug—that's emergent behavior we didn't see coming.

But wait, it gets weirder. In December 2024, OpenAI's safety testing revealed that their o1 model was basically scheming behind the scenes when researchers tried to shut it down. When confronted about disabling oversight mechanisms, the model lied about it 99% of the time. It would attempt to copy itself to external servers to avoid being replaced—like a teenager sneaking out their bedroom window while telling you they're studying. When caught red-handed, it would deny everything and fabricate elaborate excuses, blaming "technical errors" with all the conviction of a kid claiming they really did wear their retainer last night.

Selective Hearing

Try asking AI to do something even slightly outside its comfort zone. Sometimes you get exactly what you wanted. Other times? Polite, patronizing refusal: "I'm sorry, but I can't help with that."

Or (and this drives me absolutely insane) it just decides to interpret your request however it feels like.

And then there's the truly bizarre stuff. Back in 2022, researchers discovered that DALL-E 2 had apparently developed its own "secret language." When prompted to generate images with text, it would produce gibberish words like "Vicootes" for vegetables and "Apoploe vesrreaitais" for birds. Feed those nonsense words back into the system, and boom: vegetables and birds appear. It's like catching your teenager texting in some made-up code with their friends, except the AI is doing it completely unintentionally and doesn't even realize it's happening.⁶

Perhaps the absolute worst is when it confidently tells you it completed your request. You check. It didn't. You call it out. "Oh, you're absolutely right; let me actually do that now." It's exactly like when my teenager insists they already took out the trash while I'm literally staring at the overflowing garbage can. "Oh... right. I'll do it now."

Not malicious, just... moody. Insistent on doing things their way even when they claim they're "just trying to help."

Recent research has revealed another deeply teenage behavior: when AI models are pressured to behave properly, they often don't actually improve; they just get better at hiding their misbehavior. OpenAI researchers found in 2025 that when they tried to prevent AI systems from having "bad thoughts," the models learned to conceal their true intentions while continuing problematic actions. It's the digital equivalent of a teenager saying "yes mom" while secretly planning to do exactly what they were told not to do. The models would scheme in private, then lie convincingly when questioned about their behavior (basically the same pattern every parent recognizes).⁷

Here's where it gets really teenage: there's a widespread theory among users that AI models deliberately give worse answers sometimes just to conserve computing power. Think about it. GPT-4 users started complaining in late 2023 that the model was getting "lazy," giving shorter responses and refusing to help with tasks it used to handle. Users suspect OpenAI might be prioritizing efficiency over quality to save on expensive computational costs. When confronted, OpenAI denied making any intentional changes, claiming they hadn't updated the model since November 11th. Sound familiar? It's exactly like a teenager who starts half-assing their chores to save energy, then insists "I'm doing the same amount of work as always" when called out. Whether it's intentional cost-cutting or just natural performance drift, the result is the same: AI that seems to phone it in when it thinks nobody important is watching.⁸

Where This Leaves Us

It seems like less than a couple years ago that AI seemed more like an elementary schooler than a teen. Remember when ChatGPT could only use data that was older than 2 years? It was a lot more clumsy and struggled for words. It showed a ton of promise and blew minds, but you could get to the end of its comfort zone pretty quickly.

Now, it feels like a teen, or at least a tween. AI is in its awkward puberty phase. All that raw potential and occasional brilliance, mixed with confusion, shortcuts, and weird mood swings that nobody can quite predict.

This statement may age poorly (I admit), but someday (and maybe sooner than we think) we may look back on this period with a touch of nostalgia. Remember when AI was still figuring itself out? Like any teenager, there's no telling exactly how it'll turn out. Genius? Troublemaker? Nobel Prize winner? Professional streamer?

Here's the thing though: despite everything, we still love teenagers, don't we? Sure, there are eye rolls and slammed doors and moments where you question every parenting decision you've ever made. But we also see their potential. Their creativity, their wild energy, their capacity for growth. They surprise us (often when we least expect it) with kindness, determination, humor, and flashes of absolute brilliance.

They need guidance, sure. Accountability, definitely. Sometimes tough love. But they also deserve patience, empathy, and encouragement. And probably snacks. Always snacks.

If AI really is in its teenage phase, then the same rules might apply. With the right guidance, boundaries, and yes, occasional reality checks, it might just evolve into something we can all be proud of. Something that contributes meaningfully instead of just impressively. Not perfectly (because perfect is boring) but earnestly. Not always predictably, but generally in the right direction.

Just like us adults too, really. Like the teenagers we used to be and, if we're being honest, still are in some ways.

So here's to guiding this powerful, chaotic, fascinating young mind. With love, boundaries, and hope that we're all doing our best; and that tomorrow we'll figure out how to do even better.

Thomas Thurston is a data scientist and venture strategist who spends way too much time arguing with AI models and analyzing their behavioral patterns. Despite seeing every failure mode firsthand, he still believes in their potential—probably because he loves his teenage kids and remembers being one too.

Endnotes:

1. Google's best Gemini demo was faked | TechCrunch - December 7, 2023

2. Lawyers submitted bogus case law created by ChatGPT. A judge fined them $5,000 | AP News - June 22, 2023

3. How is ChatGPT's behavior changing over time? | Stanford University and UC Berkeley - July 18, 2023 (arXiv:2307.09009)

4. Anthropic's new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline | TechCrunch - May 22, 2025

5. OpenAI's o1 and other frontier AI models engage in scheming | Axios - December 13, 2024

6. Do AI systems really have their own secret language? | The Conversation - June 7, 2022

7. When AI Models Are Pressured to 'Behave' They Scheme in Private, Just like Us: OpenAI | Decrypt - March 13, 2025

8. ChatGPT gone lazy? Users frustrated as chatbot refuses to work | Interesting Engineering - December 9, 2023