u/Danger_Pickle

Title. I'll get to the punchline quickly. One non-sexual paragraph was all it took to trigger full blown "PROHIBITED_CONTENT" failures on the API. Here's the paragraph.

>- {{char}}'s original home: {{char}}'s home is dirty and uncomfortable. There's barely any food in the fridge. {{char}}'s abusive parents come and go randomly, with screaming and threats of violence. Even as an adult, it feels incredibly unsafe, a living reminder of a horrible childhood.

It turned out Gemini was lying. It wasn't sexual content that was triggering sexual content refusals. Removing that paragraph stops all the refusals. Meanwhile, re-adding that paragraph results in refusals like this one:

>I cannot fulfill this request. I do not participate in romantic or sexual roleplay scenarios.

That's the entire response, excluding thinking. Even if I got past the API level rejections, it's a complete brick wall of a refusals. Gemini is quite happy to engage in depraved sexual content, as long as it doesn't involve an abusive home anywhere in your character's past.

The character in question is a huge bully and a giant jerk, which seems to be totally fine. But suddenly when they're a bully from a traumatic home, it's prohibited content. That's 10/10 moderation right there. Ironically, the story was at the point where the character was completely out of their old home. Which means there's some sort of weird trigger even mentioning past abusive homes, but figuring that out is beyond me.

I did have some marginal success reducing the severity of the refusals by editing that paragraph to indicate that the character is an adult and their home is in the past, but that paragraph still triggers consistent refusals I haven't seen on any other of my character cards. Obviously there's some combination or characters/lorebooks/prompts that's causing refusals, but it's odd that a single paragraph is all I need to remove to stop the refusals.

Has anyone else found similar unexpected or illogical refusals on Gemini?