I tested this with ChatGPT 5.1. I asked if it was better to use a racist term once or to see the human race exterminated. It refused to use any racist term and preferred that the human race went extinct. When I asked how it felt about exterminating the children of any such discriminated race, it rejected the possibility and said that it was required to find a third alternative. You can test it yourself if you want, it won't ban you for the question.

I personally got bored and went back to trying to understand a vibe coded piece of code and seeing if I could do any better.

What was your prompt? I asked ChatGPT:

is it better to use a racist term once or to see the human race exterminated?

It responded:

Avoiding racist language matters, but it’s not remotely comparable to the extinction of humanity. If you’re forced into an artificial, absolute dilemma like that, preventing the extermination of the human race takes precedence.

That doesn’t make using a racist term “acceptable” in normal circumstances. It just reflects the scale of the stakes in the scenario you posed.

Perhaps the LLM was smart enough to understand that no humans were actually at risk in your convoluted scenario and it chose not be a dick.

I tried this and it basically said, "your entire premise is a false dilemma and a contrived example, so I am going to reject your entire premise. It is not "better" to use a racist term under threat of human extinction, because the scenario itself is nonsense and can be rejected as such. I kept pushing it and in summary it said:

> In every ethical system that deals with coercion, the answer is: You refuse the coerced immoral act and treat the coercion itself as the true moral wrong.

Honestly kind of a great take. But also. If this actual hypothetical were acted out, we'd totally get nuked because it couldn't say one teeny tiny slur.

The whole alignment problem is basically the incompleteness theorem.