It can be destructive for any long-form creative work.

The only real defense is ensuring that the history the model receives doesn't contain such replies. So it should be either prevented early or later fixed by providing a summary of the previous conversation instead of the actual history.

What that means is that testing and evals are playing an increasingly critical role in developing agentic systems, as updating or changing the underlying model will lead to unpredictable changes in an agent’s behaviour.

Fixing seeds doesn't help. Setting temperature to 0 doesn't help. Every small floating point rounding error can ultimately lead to drastically different results.

The complex models are, in essence, chaotic systems and should be treated as such.