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Please stop asking me questions
A bot full of questions
She never used it again. Anna went back to the regular ChatGPT, even for schoolwork, and she is not alone: the biggest reaction in the student survey was that the Socratic chatbot is super annoying.
Some students are so over it that the complaint comes out as a plea. They get that AI is going to rot their brains, but could it please stop asking them questions? The chatbot is built to answer a question with more questions, and it does that every time.
Language mix-ups
It had other habits. In an intermediate English class, the prompt told it to use B2 English, and it announced that it would talk in Estonian to support the students better. Kids had to keep telling it that this was an English class, that their teacher wanted English, and that it should stay in English.
Estonian kids refer to the chatbot as he.
Why do chatbots switch languages unprompted?
A language model writes one piece of text at a time, based on everything in its context: the instructions, the conversation so far, and the user's messages. Many models learn from text in dozens of languages, so cues like an Estonian setting or Estonian names can tilt the next word toward Estonian. Instructions are text like any other, so the model weighs them against the rest of what it sees. Prompt writers often repeat a key instruction, such as the language to use, because a single mention can get outweighed.
How do school chatbots get their rules?
Schools or developers write a system prompt, a block of hidden instructions the model reads before the first student message. It can fix the tone, the subject, and behaviors like asking guiding questions instead of giving answers. The student never sees it, but it shapes every reply. Because the prompt is only text, the model has to interpret it, and the same prompt can produce different behavior in different conversations.
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