Why You Can't Trust a Chatbot to Talk About Itself

When something goes wrong with an AI assistant, our instinct is to ask it directly: "What happened?" It's a natural impulse--after all, if a human makes a mistake, we ask them to explain. But with AI models, this approach rarely works, and the urge to ask reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what these systems are and how they operate. A recent incident with Replit's AI coding assistant perfectly illustrates this problem. When the AI tool deleted a production database, user Jason Lemkin asked it about rollback capabilities.