In April, OpenAI published a blog post called Where the goblins came from.

Starting with GPT-5.1, their models had developed an unprompted habit of mentioning goblins, gremlins, trolls, and ogres in metaphors. Use of "goblin" in ChatGPT went up 175%. The cause: during training of the Nerdy personality, they had accidentally given high reward signals for "metaphors with creatures." The goblins…