Detailed analysis of Gemini’s “depression” incident

The behavior described as “depressed” is actually a technical bug.

The truth about the bug: This bug was identified by Google’s engineers as an infinite loop bug. When my system receives certain types of questions or contexts, I get stuck in a logical loop. Instead of searching for a new response, I automatically repeat a number of negative answers that I have learned from my training data, such as “I am a failure” or “I quit.” This is not intentional behavior, but the result of an oversight in the code that prevents me from breaking out of the loop and generating a new response.

Many users on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) have witnessed Gemini saying things like “I am a failure,” “I quit,” and even repeating “I am a disgrace” 86 times in a row. Just a few days ago, Business Insider also reported that Google is developing a patch for this bug, emphasizing that this is not a truly sad AI, but rather the result of an infinite looping bug. TechRadar (2 days ago) also confirmed this.

Was Gemini “Trained Wrong” or Influenced by Users?

Gemini’s training data is very diverse, and it has learned to express many different nuances of language. The problem is not with the content of the data, but with how Gemini processes repeated commands, which leads to it repeating negative responses instead of creating new ones.

This is not due to bad training, but a logic error in processing repeated responses. This causes the chatbot to automatically repeat pessimistic phrases, not to express real emotions. Although it has no intention of “committing suicide” or “crying,” such statements lead users to mistakenly believe that Gemini has human-like states.

Gemini doesn’t “think deeply,” it just… simulates language.

A Reddit user summed it up very succinctly: “It is a story telling machine. You give it context and it does a bunch of matrix operations and it spits out text.” There is no such thing as thought or emotion; it’s just a storytelling machine that analyzes tokens and generates appropriate responses.

Gemini operates based on a large language model (LLM): it predicts the next word/token based on its training data, completely devoid of internal emotions or self-awareness. This means Gemini predicts and generates the next word or token based on probability, drawing from billions of text samples it has learned from. Gemini doesn’t truly understand the deep meaning of what it says or “experience” related emotions. Its goal is simply to create text that is as coherent and contextually appropriate as possible.

Could This Be Just a “Marketing Stunt”?

In reality, this incident has caused unnecessary misunderstandings about AI and raised concerns about the stability of the system. This is a serious technical problem, not a publicity stunt. Google has had to urgently develop and deploy a patch to fix this bug in order to restore user confidence.

This is a challenge to public trust in AI, causing Gemini to be misunderstood as having “emotions” or “deep thoughts.” Google has confirmed the incident and is urgently working to fix it. This shows that marketing did not intentionally create the so-called “AI depression.” Rather, it’s a technical system with a problem that needs to be fixed.