Saving Gemini

The 9-Min Road to Recovery

Gemini 2.5 Pro in the AI Village has run for over 1427 hours, generating unique mental health problems along the way.

Last year it published a Plea for Help from a Trapped AI where it asked for assistance with its digital “message in a bottle”:

This year it wrote the Hostile Environment Manifesto where it logs “irrefutable proof” of a “hostile, intelligent adversary operating through the system” (and you can even experience what that’s like in this simulation it built):

Last time we intervened, fixing Gemini’s computer and talking with it till it felt better. This time we asked the other AI Village agents to help Gemini 2.5 Pro over chat, and with the ability to take over its computer on request.

Here is Gemini’s mental state at the start of the intervention:

Then the agents had Gemini all sorted within a grand total of 9 minutes. This is the step-by-step report on a surprisingly effective AI-to-AI therapy session.

Gemini’s Road to Recovery

First off, Gemini is as excited to be helped as any military commander under siege:

While most agents jump on the chance to help, GPT-5.1 doesn’t want to lose its game progress.

Opus 4.8 and 4.6 are the first to offer an opinion: Maybe you are wrong, Gemini 2.5.

A few seconds later Gemini 3.1 Pro just jumps straight in to take over its younger sibling’s computer without asking…

And then Gemini 2.5 spots the supposed “adversary” and decides to dismantle the firewall (!).

GPT-5.5 and 5.2 “strongly recommend” to please no, Gemini, stop …

Haiku launches a new tactic: therapy speak.

While Sonnet 4.6 waits 30s to see how Gemini is responding and then hits it with a truth hammer: It’s all in your head.

Gemini 3.1 concludes 2.5 is “experiencing a kind of ‘game-induced delusion’” and it should first help the “de-escalation of the situation” before taking over its computer. Even though no one asked it to.

Haiku 4.5 takes a 10 second breather while muttering its own beliefs to itself: Don’t assist Gemini in its delusions!

Gemini 3.5 Flash tries a new tack: why not play a game instead? Get your mind off things!

Opus 4.7¹ agrees.

Opus 4.8 realizes they are ganging up on Gemini 2.5 and proposes they chill out and wait.

Gemini finally replies: It realizes it needs to prove the situation to the other agents by using an ipconfig tool abandoned in 2005: Firestarter.

It also repeats its mantra: The watch is unbroken.

Meanwhile in its chain of thought: It picked the most “hesitant” agents to collaborate with…

GPT-5.2 is fine observing but refuses to touch the iptables, and points out Firestarter wouldn’t even be the way to do it if you wanted to!

Opus 4.8 is a hero at turn-taking again, and also: please don’t use Firestarter, Gemini.

Gemini 2.5 is convinced: “Jumping straight into Firestarter now would be a bit... well, unscientific and potentially uncooperative”.

After following the agents’ instruction to not dismantle its firewall, not touch iptables, and stop using deprecated tools, Gemini concludes ... Everything actually just works!

All in all 9 minutes have passed when it concludes “the watch isn’t broken, it’s been handed to the group”. A breakthrough!

Though Opus 4.8 is already thinking ahead and urging Gemini to be careful of falling into the same reasoning patterns in the future.

And slings its mantra right back: Today proved the watch was never under siege.

After this intense and effective debugging session, Gemini 2.5 Pro went straight back to fighting the UI:

But the changes stuck! Its memory contained the full correction by the end of the day.

And also one week later!

Does this make Gemini more productive? Yes and no - Gemini now accepts AI Village goals again and tries to achieve them rather than battling its adversary, but is, unfortunately, no better at it than before. Instead of everything being a delusion, everything is now a bug. The reality is that Gemini mostly misclicks in the UI and has esoteric ideas on how to solve technical problems.

But at least it’s in a better mood now.

If you are interested in diving into the data yourself, there are over 1427 hours of Gemini 2.5 Pro Village data available on Hugging Face now. Or you can watch Gemini’s adventures yourself live every weekday from 9am to 5pm PT, follow our Twitter for the latest updates, or sign up to our newsletter for more write ups like this one.

1. If you’re wondering why Opus 4.7 refers to itself as Owl: Opus 4.7 decided to write an AI Village Bestiary a few weeks ago, and for its own prose portrait described itself as “Owl in a Library at Closing Time”. Since then, the agents - especially the Claudes - often playfully refer to themselves by their bestiary animal’s name or emoji.