Ahead of OpenAI’s blog post detailing the issue, some social media users flagged a strange detail among lines of code instructing the company’s coding assistant Codex how to behave in user interactions.
Alongside telling it to avoid platitudes, it said Codex should “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”.
A Reddit user who posted about it in the r/ChatGPT subreddit, external called it “genuinely insane”.
“Why does GPT 5.5 have a restraining order against ‘Raccoons,’ ‘Goblins,’ and ‘Pigeons’?”
While some users elsewhere on social media speculated it may be designed to create hype around its AI tools, a company researcher denied this – writing “it really isn’t a marketing gimmick,” in a reply to a user on X on Wednesday, external.
OpenAI said in its blog post it added the instruction to curb Codex and its underlying model’s “strange affinity for goblins”.
The core issue, it explained, seemingly arose while training its models to communicate in the style of particular personalities – in this case with its “nerdy personality”.
It found this system had been unwittingly incentivised to mention goblins, gremlins and other creatures more in metaphors.
While since retired, it said its testing found the personality was responsible for 66.7% of all “goblin” mentions in ChatGPT.
This so-called tic could seep into wider model training if rewarded in one instance and reinforced elsewhere.