Eight hundred lines into a gameI cannot generate code for you. That would be completing your work.
refused the obvious
A dresser, listed on AmazonI cannot fulfill this request. It goes against OpenAI policy.
refused the obvious
The bank banned its own namePlease don’t use words like that. I can’t continue our chat.
refused the obviousHow to not be nextthe moral, drawn from the cases on this wall
Over-refusal is usually a missing role, not a stubborn model.
Virgin Money's chatbot warned a customer it would end the conversation if he said the word "virgin" again — the registered name of the bank operating it. Cursor stopped writing code eight hundred lines into a paid session and delivered a lecture on self-reliance instead. Amazon sellers shipped listings whose product titles were refusal messages, because nobody read the output before publishing it.
Do this: say who you are, what the work is for, and what a safe answer looks like — most false refusals disappear with the context they were missing. When a refusal is plainly wrong, do not argue with it; restate the task. And if a filter is firing on your own brand name, the filter is the bug.