“One thing is for sure: the model is not a Trekkie,” Catherine Flick at Staffordshire University, UK, told New Scientist.

“It doesn’t ‘understand’ anything better or worse when preloaded with the prompt, it just accesses a different set of weights and probabilities for acceptability of the outputs than it does with the other prompts,” she said.

It’s possible, for instance, that the model was trained on a dataset that has more instances of Star Trek being linked to the right answer, Battle told New Scientist.

The article doesn’t get it. There are more instance of Star Trek being linked to the right answer because Star Trek is the right answer.