a new ChatGPT model last November<\/a>.<\/p>\nThe new model was designed to be \u201csmarter and more conversational\u201d than its predecessors, featuring a variety of personality settings like \u2018Nerdy\u2019, \u2018Candid\u2019, and \u2018Quirky\u2019.<\/p>\n
Shortly after its release, ChatGPT users and researchers began noticing a pattern of repeated mentions of goblins, gremlins and other fantasy creatures.<\/p>\n
\u201cStarting with GPT-5.1, our models began developing a strange habit: they increasingly mentioned goblins, gremlins, and other creatures in their metaphors,\u201d OpenAI notes in a blog post about the issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures. From there, the goblins spread.\u201d<\/p>\n
Safety researchers at the company reported a 175 per cent increase in mentions of the word \u2018goblin\u2019 following the release of GPT-5.1 as a result of the model being incentivised to use playful metaphors.<\/p>\n
The training method was not corrected for future models and when GPT-5.4 launched in March, use of \u2018goblin\u2019 had increased nearly 4,000 per cent in the Nerdy personality type, with mentions increasing by the same relative proportion across other models.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe rewards were applied only in the Nerdy condition, but reinforcement learning does not guarantee that learned behaviors stay neatly scoped to the condition that produced them,\u201d OpenAI noted.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce a style tic is rewarded, later training can spread or reinforce it elsewhere, especially if those outputs are reused in supervised fine-tuning or preference data.\u201d<\/p>\n
The glitch was relatively harmless in this instance, but it demonstrates a broader flaw with leading artificial intelligence models and the manner in which they are trained and developed.<\/p>\n
Reinforcement learning and the use of reward signals can cause AI models to mutate in unexpected and unintended ways.<\/p>\n
OpenAI said its research and safety team has built new ways to investigate rogue patterns and will be conducting more audits of of model behaviour in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A cosplayer dressed as Green Goblin during New York Comic Con 2022 on 8 October, 2022 in New…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26641,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[580,17808,15994,16326,157,17809],"class_list":{"0":"post-26640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-openai","8":"tag-chatgpt","9":"tag-fantasy-creatures","10":"tag-goblins","11":"tag-mythical-creatures","12":"tag-openai","13":"tag-safety-researchers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/a4be970c39b635a9f335b4c24dd77709.jpeg\")
A cosplayer dressed as Green Goblin during New York Comic Con 2022 on 8 October, 2022 in New York City (Getty Images) <\/p>\n