Ben Glickman, writing for the Wall Street Journal:

OpenAI recently gave its popular ChatGPT strict instructions: Stop talking about goblins.

Recent models of the artificial-intelligence chatbot have been bringing up the creatures in conversations with users seemingly out of the blue […]

Barron Roth, a 32-year-old product manager at a tech company, said the bot referred to a flaw in his code as a “classic little goblin.” He said he counted more than 20 times it mentioned goblins, without any prompting.

[…]

Part of the explanation lies in ChatGPT’s “personality” feature, which allows users to select from a handful of prompt instructions that give the chatbot more distinct characteristics. OpenAI said that for the bot’s “nerdy” personality, […] mentions of goblins in its GPT-5.4 model increased 3,881% from a previous version.

For the “professional” personality, the chat-bot dialed back the fun. Goblins were mentioned 7% less.

Personally, I’d like to see more use of goblins in professional settings, not less.