Rephrase-and-Respond: make the model restate your question before it answers

Ask a friend "was Tom Cruise born in an even month?" and they answer without blinking. They quietly decided you meant an even-numbered month (February, April, and so on), not a month with an even number of days. That silent disambiguation is so automatic you never notice it happening. A language model doesn't get to do that. It can't stop and ask what you meant. It just continues the most likely text, which means it picks one reading of your question — often the most common one in its training…