Comment by amenhotep

This is a sort of interesting point, it's true that knowingly-metaphorical anthropomorphisation is hard to distinguish from genuine anthropomorphisation with them and that's food for thought, but the actual situation here just isn't applicable to it. This is a very specific mistaken conception that people make all the time. The OP explicitly thought that the model would know why it did the wrong thing, or at least followed a strategy adjacent to that misunderstanding. He was surprised that adding extra slop to the prompt was no more effective than telling it what to do himself. It's not a figure of speech.