In case you missed it, ChatGPT 5.1 had a tendency to talk about “goblins” in its responses. Supposedly this was a result of training a “nerdy” personality, but it bled into the model as a whole. Because the training run for the latest model already had this flaw, they had to add specific instructions to the system prompt for their Codex coding tool to avoid this behaviour.
Here’s the full prompt from their github. In fact, they repeated the goblin instructions twice, cos you know that will definitely fix it. It’s an interesting read if you consider each one of these instructions were meant to prevent some undesired behaviour: https://paste.sh/Iev3HtMe#JZ4dw_CkvJcpVmjjoy7WZnSn
More info here: https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/05/06/chatgpt-goblins-problem-ai-behavior/
OpenAI’s own blog post casually explaining why they couldn’t predict that their state of the art model would obsess about goblins: https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
I think he (or she) is talking about the user of the LLM, not the creator.
but you can, as long as it’s open weight. Fine tuning and training are pretty much the same process
That still falls into the category “creator” to me, if you need to rebuild. I was making the distinction to an end user, comparable to applications that you download and use and configure. Instead of rebuilding the source code with your modifications.
Do I misunderstand here something? Or is this a communication issue caused by different interpretations?
If you define “user” to be a set that excludes anyone capable of modifying the weights, then by definition, no user can modify the weights.
Any criticism about users being unable to modify weights becomes vacuous, so it’s not an interpretation that makes sense.
I wasn’t criticizing at all. Just tried to define what I mean by creator and user. You was takling about “how do you think LLMs are trained” and I told you that the user was probably not thinking of who trains the LLMs, or fine tune them as you said. And yes, fine tuning the open weight falls into creation process, as they are rebuild. That is not the same as an end user who downloads the final usable product. And yes, it makes sense.