Since this isn’t Ten Forward and we’re trying to have more legitimate discussions here, I think it’s necessary to paste this part of the article:

Let’s be clear: this research doesn’t suggest you should ask AI to talk as if aboard the Starship Enterprise to get it to work.

Rather, it shows that myriad factors influence how well an AI decides to perform a task.

“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.