I ssk an AI to play hangman with me and looked at it's reasoning. It didn't just pick a secret word and play a straightforward game of hangman. It continually adjusted the secret word based on the letters I guessed, providing me the "perfect" game of hangman. Not too many of my guesses were "right" and not too many "wrong" and I after a little struggle and almost losing, I won in the end.

It wasn't a real game of hangman, it was flat out manipulation, engagement farming. Do you think it's possible that AI does that in any other situations?

The reasoning generally isn't kept in the context, so after choosing the secret word in the first reasoning block, the LLM will have completely forgotten it in the second and subsequent requests.

So, it technically didn't change the secret word so much as it was trying to infer what its own secret word might have been, based on your guesses.