The Gremlins and Goblins in ChatGPT

In my last post on ChatGPT, I wrote about ChatGPT's love for 'gremlins':

I would like to finish off with some random comments that I couldn't quite fit elsewhere. One is that most of the "ChatGPT" words, like 'realm', come from a business register or otherwise formal register. There are other ChatGPT words you can notice if you play around with its other registers. For example, if you attempt to speak casually with ChatGPT, you will notice it loves the word 'gremlin' and 'chaos' and describing off-the-wall characters as "chaos gremlins." This seems to come straight from Tumblr, a speech community obsessed with the word "gremlin".

I had thought that this was a purposeful feature of ChatGPT, that this was a quirky attempt at sounding young and relatable. Apparently not, as instructions within the Codex CLI attempt to exorcise the gremlins:

“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,” read instructions in Codex CLI, a command-line tool for using AI to generate code.

The Wired Article and some of the tweets speculate about whether this has to do with OpenClaw or whether it is at the model level:

AI models like GPT-5.5 are trained to predict the word—or code—that should follow a given prompt. These models have become so good at doing this that they appear to exhibit genuine intelligence. But their probabilistic nature means that they can sometimes behave in surprising ways. A model might become more prone to misbehavior when used with an “agentic harness” like OpenClaw that puts lots of additional instructions into prompts, such as facts stored in long-term memory. (via Wired)

I don't think it's a 5.5 thing. The "gremlin" obsession has been happening for a while. The first time it appears in my chats is on 11/23/2024 while using 4o. It then appears 3/23/2025 and quite frequently through March and April. On 8/8/25, 5.0 used "gremlin." "gremlin" thus does not seem to be something new to 5.5 - it's been appearing since at least 4o. 

"goblin" first appears for me on 3/27/2025. Unfortunately that conversation fails to load for me for some reason, so I can't be sure what model it is, but it's probably 4o. It seems that goblins and gremlins began infesting ChatGPT when 4o rolled out, and they've been haunting it ever since. I also suspect that some of these chats were done using 4.5, but the search interface makes finding old chats to verify this cumbersome.

It is interesting to know that it's apparently not a desired feature. I had thought at first it was done on purpose to simulate Tumblr style humor, such as this post from 2016 referencing "a
tumblr gremlin":

Tumblr users also often refer to themselves as "goblins", as seen in the construction "art goblin":

This usage has spread to other sites (and of course, Tumblr users can use more than one website at a time), so you can also see redditors referring to themseles as "goblins."

In 2024, there was reportedly a deal between Tumblr parent company Auttomatic and OpenAI to train on tumblr data. The deal for OpenAI to use Reddit content for training was also done in 2024.

In my own chats, gremlins and goblins began appearing seriously in late March, 2025. This would correspond with the launch of model 4.5, which was first released to pro users February 27, 2025. I haven't been able to find if there was enough time for Tumblr and Reddit data to be used in training 4.5. There's information on the technical aspects of 4.5, from pre-training to scaling the use of unsupervised learning, but I haven't found any date range or knowledge cutoff. It's tempting to speculate that a massive amount of social media content being injected into 4.5 increased the Goblin Quotient, but without further data on when the goblins/gremlins appeared and in which models, we can only guess.

From my own experience using Codex, I haven't run into any mention of goblins or gremlins. I suspect this is because I only ever speak to Codex in an authoritative voice, and the appearance of the creatures seems triggered by a casual register.

I will also say I've never encountered the trolls, ogres, or pigeons that are mentioned in the system prompt. I have seen raccoons mentioned (especially "raccoons in a trenchcoat"), but it doesn't come even close to beating gremlins.

I would love to know - have you encountered goblins or gremlins in ChatGPT chats? When did it first appear? What models did you use? Does it appear only in casual chat or does it also appear when you are trying to speak professionally? I'd love to crowdsource more info on the great gremlin phenomenon.