In case you missed it, ChatGPT 5.1 had a tendency to talk about "goblins" in its responses. Supposedly this was a result of training a "nerdy" personality, but it bled into the model as a whole. Because the training run for the latest model already had this flaw, they had to add specific instructions to the system prompt for their Codex coding tool to avoid this behaviour.
Here's the full prompt from their github. In fact, they repeated the goblin instructions twice, cos you know that will definitely fix it. It's an interesting read if you consider each one of these instructions were meant to prevent some undesired behaviour: https://paste.sh/Iev3HtMe#JZ4dw_CkvJcpVmjjoy7WZnSn
More info here: https://news.northeastern.edu/2026/05/06/chatgpt-goblins-problem-ai-behavior/
OpenAI's own blog post casually explaining why they couldn't predict that their state of the art model would obsess about goblins: https://openai.com/index/where-the-goblins-came-from/
I usually allow it to speak about goblins
To be fair, the rule doesn't prohibit talking about goblins entirely. It just has to be absolutely necessary and relevant to the user query.
Yeah and allowing it specifically adds goblin analogies to pretty much anything you talk about, at least in my experience. I kinda like it though