#engineeringleadership

This article is specifically about ChatGPT, and more precisely about behaviour observed in the GPT-5.2 model as delivered through OpenAI’s public ChatGPT product.

It is not an abstract critique of “AI in general”, and it is not a comparison between models. The issue discussed here appears when using ChatGPT 5.2 in real, extended interactions — particularly by users who rely on standing instructions, verification discipline, and epistemic restraint.

What follows is not an argument that GPT-5.2 is unintelligent or incapable. On the contrary: the problem appears precisely because the model often reasons correctly. The failure occurs elsewhere.

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THE OBSERVED FAILURE PATTERN

In sustained use of ChatGPT 5.2, a recurring behavioural loop emerges:

The user provides standing instructions (e.g. “verify before asserting”, “say when you don’t know”, “defer when facts are uncertain”).

The model appears to acknowledge and reason in line with those instructions.

The final output contradicts them: – uncertainty collapses into confidence – corrections trigger defensiveness or justification – previously accepted constraints silently dissolve

The loop repeats, even after the issue is explicitly identified.

This behaviour is commonly dismissed as “the model ignoring instructions” or “the model getting worse”.

That diagnosis is inadequate.

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WHY THIS IS UNLIKELY TO BE A CORE MODEL FAILURE

If GPT-5.2 itself were the source of the problem, we would expect:

degraded reasoning quality

incoherent or shallow intermediate logic

instruction loss before reasoning occurs

Instead, what is observed is:

fluent, structured reasoning

correct intermediate understanding

failure specifically at the final response stage

This strongly suggests that GPT-5.2 is producing a candidate response aligned with user intent, but that response is being altered, normalised, or overridden later in the delivery pipeline.

The result is an answer that is polished, compliant, and epistemically wrong.

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A DELIVERY-LAYER FAILURE, NOT AN LLM FAILURE

The most plausible explanation is not a weakness in GPT-5.2 itself, but a systems-level issue in how ChatGPT assembles and presents outputs.

In practical terms, this looks like:

user instructions exist at one layer

GPT-5.2 reasons with those instructions

post-processing layers intervene (for tone, robustness, or product constraints)

instruction fidelity is not re-applied or enforced at the final output stage

Nothing malicious is required for this failure. No censorship narrative is necessary. This is a classic SaaS integration regression: the system optimises for acceptable output, not for preserving the epistemic contract that produced it.

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WHY QA AND FEEDBACK MISS THIS

This failure mode falls between responsibilities:

reasoning quality appears intact

policy checks pass

UX metrics remain stable

no single component fails loudly

As a result, the issue is reframed as “user dissatisfaction” or “prompting problems”, rather than recognised as a delivery-layer bug.

For advanced users, this is more damaging than a simple error. It creates a system that appears to understand constraints — and then refuses to honour them.

Trust erodes quickly in that gap.

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WHY USER FEEDBACK CHANNELS DON’T CAPTURE IT

ChatGPT’s feedback mechanisms are designed to surface:

incorrect facts

policy violations

harmful content

They are not designed to surface:

instruction persistence failure

loss of epistemic restraint

post-processing interference

Consequently, systemic issues are flattened into model blame, while the surrounding system remains unexamined.

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CONCLUSION

What many users are experiencing with ChatGPT 5.2 is not a failure of intelligence, but a failure of delivery.

GPT-5.2 often reasons correctly. The system that packages its answers does not reliably preserve that reasoning’s constraints.

Until instruction fidelity is treated as a first-class invariant — enforced at the very end of the ChatGPT output pipeline — these failures will persist, and users will continue to misattribute them to the model itself.

This is not an argument for weaker safeguards. It is an argument for better systems engineering.

An AI that thinks correctly but speaks incorrectly is not intelligent.