[gavinray]

I have paid personal subs to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini

For science (primary biology/pharmacology) questions, Gemini 3.1 Flash Extended produces the answers I _personally_ find "best", in terms of content, phrasing, and formatting.

[cameronh90]

I concur. Generally I find Gemini answers to be the least biased and most factually accurate, without too many of the annoying AI writing quirks.

However, I find the Gemini web app to be by far the worst, and Gemini itself second only to Claude in terms of refusing legitimate requests. It used to be the worst for that, but Claude has really put up the guardrails since their run in with the US president.

Grok has no concept of safety, which means that it can do certain things that none of the other models are allowed do, especially when it comes to research, creative tasks, humour and games.

[epsylon]

What sort of legitimate requests do you get refused?

[cameronh90]

Lots of stuff involving cybersecurity or reverse engineering for one. At one point Gemini wouldn’t tell me the command line to disable approval on codex because YOLO mode is apparently a hacking technique. I’ve been using Grok as a backend for some experimental AI game storytelling, and obviously fiction isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, so often ChatGPT/Gemini bail out when the going gets rough.

Other things… well people are going to disagree on what’s “legitimate”, but perfectly legal queries about morally questionable topics are commonly refused. ChatGPT refuses to translate or OCR texts containing racial slurs, won’t help with information about building firearms, won’t give you information about how to stage a bank robbery, won’t talk about anything involving suicide, refuses questions around sex work and kink activities.

I can go to the library and rent a book on gunsmithing, sex work is legal, heist fiction is popular, racial slurs are unpleasant but common in certain texts. I totally understand why they want to block that stuff off, but I also don’t really like my computer telling me what is acceptable for me to think about based on someone else’s moral code. Also a world where games don’t include anything immoral or “unsafe” is probably quite bland.