That's an old trick by now, but it shows how off the rails AI is going.

As a computer, AI has a similar problem as Microsoft Excel. In Microsoft Excel, a cell can contain data, or code -- code being any of the many formulas available in Excel, like doing something with VLOOKUP.

Data and computation should be two separate types of entities, but in Excel they're both just cells. So changes to one cell, like a mistake, can have dramatic and unexpected changes on the whole spreadsheet.

The reason you can't stop people from hiding code in an AI prompt is because the AI prompt is itself code for the AI. You can't quite tell which instructions will get you what you want, and it changes over time, but fundamentally a computer is designed to deliver desired output from given inputs.

All these chatbot AIs have this problem.

It's quite similar to the problem of keeping soneone from hacking a system when they have physical access. It's a million times harder and essentially unachievable at scale.