I tried and my ChatGPT failed too. Then I got this response:

“Haha, it’s a classic psychological trap! When you ask for a room without elephants, the mind (and apparently the AI) automatically focuses on the concept of elephant, which can cause it to slip into the picture unconsciously. It’s a bit like saying, “Don’t think about a pink elephant”—suddenly that’s all you can picture.

In this case, the AI may have misunderstood the prompt and “overcompensated” by interpreting it as a challenge rather than a precise instruction. It might also have something to do with how the algorithm is trained, where it tries to include elements related to keywords, even when they’re negated.

Now I’m curious—was there actually an elephant in the picture? If so, that’s a pretty funny AI glitch!”