OpenAI Tells ChatGPT To Stop Talking About Goblins
ChatGPT creator OpenAI has been forced to issue a unusual set of instructions to its latest AI tools: stop talking about goblins. The move comes after developers noticed that the mythical creatures, along with gremlins and various other animals, were appearing in user responses with alarming frequency.
The issue first surfaced following the launch of GPT-5.1 last November. OpenAI discovered that mentions of the word "goblin" in ChatGPT responses had surged by 175%, while "gremlin" saw a 52% increase. These linguistic quirks often manifested as metaphors, with the AI describing technical bugs or problems as "little goblins."
According to an OpenAI blog post, the "strange affinity for goblins" was traced back to a specific "nerdy personality" feature used to customize the chatbot’s tone which was inadvertently incentivized to reward creature-related language.
OpenAI found that this nerdy setting was responsible for 66.7% of all goblin mentions, even though it only accounted for 2.5% of total responses. Due to the nature of reinforcement learning, this "style tic" began to seep into other parts of the model, spreading the behavior beyond its intended scope.
The quirk became so persistent that OpenAI has added explicit "restraining orders" to its coding assistant, Codex. Social media users recently flagged system instructions that command the tool to "never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query."
While some users on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter) found the ban "genuinely insane," OpenAI researchers have confirmed that it was a necessary technical fix rather than a marketing stunt. The company noted that as AI models become more "agentic", where they were taking control of apps to complete tasks, these probabilistic oddities can become more pronounced.
The "goblin mode" phenomenon has quickly turned into an internet meme, with users sharing AI-generated images of creatures in data centers. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined the fun, jokingly posting a prompt for the next model iteration: “Start training GPT-6, you can have the whole cluster. Extra goblins."
