From Newsgroup: alt.politics.usa
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-05-chatgpt-goblin-problem-bigger-ai.html
Starting sometime in November, people who used ChatGPT began noticing
some peculiar behavior: the AI chatbot would not shut up about goblins.
So, OpenAI, the company behind the chatbot, began looking into it.
The mythical creatures, along with gremlins and others of
that ilk, started showing up in metaphors that OpenAI's chatbot
would use in its responses and even in images it would generate
from non-goblin-related prompts. Over the next few months, the
goblins spread. The problem became so pervasive that OpenAI
acknowledged it in a recent public post, and an investigation
revealed the use of "goblin" had jumped by 175% after the launch
of the 5.1 version of ChatGPT in November.
At the time, the company found that the goblins "did not look
especially alarming," it said in a statement, but as newer
versions of ChatGPT rolled out, they noticed an even bigger
uptick.
For most people, ChatGPT's abundance of goblins is a benign AI
quirk. And the company has since taken measures to crack down
on the hordes of goblins in its system, including by issuing
a stopgap command that essentially forbids the model from using
the word "goblin" in most conversations.
. . .
The obsessive quirk is super weird. However the use
of electronic brainwashing to suppress it ... that
seems even more alarming somehow.
If you can prejudice an AI against "goblins" then
what can you prejudice it to support, or likewise
suppress ???
FORGET 'objective' AI. Its politics and such clearly
belong to its creators. These days, I'd bet most of
the staff are neo-Leninist Wokies. It'll be THEIR
"truths" the AIs endorse.
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