Tuesday, a report from Wired dug into a strange instruction patched into Codex CLI, an AI coding tool: “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.” I’m always whispering this to myself so I don’t get kicked out of Dollar Tree again, but it’s a weird thing for an AI model to have to be specifically told.
It was, apparently, distractingly prevalent: one X post quoted in that article notes it frequently referred to bugs and “gremlins” and “goblins” and continued to following the update that was meant to curb the goblin talk. OpenAI has broken its silence on the matter, and published a blog Thursday titled “Where the goblins came from.”
“Model behavior is shaped by many small incentives,” the post read. “In this case, one of those incentives came from training the model for the personality customization feature, in particular the Nerdy personality. We unknowingly gave particularly high rewards for metaphors with creatures. From there, the goblins spread.”
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