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 bet they were training it on fanfiction too, since it’s often free to access and you can’t really copyright it.
Yeah i remember reading how, when telling/making up stories chat gpt loves to say that characters “smirked” which is a very fanfiction/online erotica thing.
Kinda funny because “smirk” doesn’t just mean “a hot smile.”
“Seeing him ask her favorite band, the girl smirked and said…”