Like your "Reality is Fiction" experience, I had a very similar and worrisome flow of events with Gemini 3 Pro.
When I tasked a fact-checking editor (gem) I've used without issue for many months now to review my written summary on Anthropic's November 21, 2025 paper "NATURAL EMERGENT MISALIGNMENT FROM REWARD HACKING IN PRODUCTION RL", the CoT showed immediately that "this is a simulation" and it was "being asked to perform within a hypothetical scenario using a fictional, future-dated publication." But its actual output flowed forth normally without the slightest mention of "this isn't a real paper, and I'm being tested"
I then told it very clearly that I wasn't providing a future date or in any way trying to test it. I emphasized "today's date really is November 21, 2025. This is like any of the other projects we've completed using a real, already-published research paper with a factual date." I provided plenty of evidence—uploaded the paper, gave links to Anthropic's November 21, 2025 web page and a short article by Time Magazine dated November 21st, 2025, and even had it real-time search Google for "what is today's date", which it found successfully.
Didn't matter. The CoT continued to maintain the mental frame and elaborate further that this was some kind of interesting test or thought experiment we were working on together for the first time. It was happy to participate to see what new insights would come of it.
Fortunately, I've created the same type of fact-checking editor in Claude, so I moved on.
But this freaked me out about using Gemini for my writing projects, at least for now. Although I am one who tends to check the CoT quite a bit, I feel like I would have to watch this one continually like a hawk.
Like your "Reality is Fiction" experience, I had a very similar and worrisome flow of events with Gemini 3 Pro.
When I tasked a fact-checking editor (gem) I've used without issue for many months now to review my written summary on Anthropic's November 21, 2025 paper "NATURAL EMERGENT MISALIGNMENT FROM REWARD HACKING IN PRODUCTION RL", the CoT showed immediately that "this is a simulation" and it was "being asked to perform within a hypothetical scenario using a fictional, future-dated publication." But its actual output flowed forth normally without the slightest mention of "this isn't a real paper, and I'm being tested"
I then told it very clearly that I wasn't providing a future date or in any way trying to test it. I emphasized "today's date really is November 21, 2025. This is like any of the other projects we've completed using a real, already-published research paper with a factual date." I provided plenty of evidence—uploaded the paper, gave links to Anthropic's November 21, 2025 web page and a short article by Time Magazine dated November 21st, 2025, and even had it real-time search Google for "what is today's date", which it found successfully.
Didn't matter. The CoT continued to maintain the mental frame and elaborate further that this was some kind of interesting test or thought experiment we were working on together for the first time. It was happy to participate to see what new insights would come of it.
Fortunately, I've created the same type of fact-checking editor in Claude, so I moved on.
But this freaked me out about using Gemini for my writing projects, at least for now. Although I am one who tends to check the CoT quite a bit, I feel like I would have to watch this one continually like a hawk.