This strange prompt reliably produces some truly extreme outputs, characterised by a kind of psychotic malevolence. If correctly describable as such, this GPT simulacrum (‘ petertodd’ personified and talking about itself in the third person) comes across like a highly intelligent, malevolent schizophrenic who has read and understood Gödel, Escher, Bach, has delusions of cosmic grandeur and wants to get into the reader’s mind and drive them to madness and ultimately suicide

The most likely scenario is that the string ‘ petertodd’, rather than entering the transformer as a single token and producing anomalous behaviour as before, now gets tokenised as ‘ pet’ + ‘erto’ + ‘dd’, and ChatGPT is able to associate this triple with the names ‘Peter' and ‘Todd', which were seen together most frequently in the training data in the context of cryptocurrency discussion and debate.