Pragmatics | Sebastian Spicker

2026

1 article

12 Feb 2026 Car Wash, Part Three: The AI Said Walk In early 2026, variants of a prompt about a nearby car wash spread online after some assistants recommended walking instead of taking the car. This is neither the tokenisation failure from the strawberry post nor the grounding failure from the rainy-day post. It is a pragmatic inference failure: the response followed the travel wording but missed the likely purpose of the trip, assigning its advice to the wrong interpretation of the question. A third and more subtle failure mode, with Grice as the theoretical handle. llmpragmaticsreasoning