337
Ladies and gentleman, we have reached peak Agentic AI Coding - Goblin instructions in OpenAI's Codex system prompt (lemmy.ca)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by to c/programming@programming.dev
37 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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/

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

I wasn't criticizing at all. Just tried to define what I mean by creator and user. You was takling about "how do you think LLMs are trained" and I told you that the user was probably not thinking of who trains the LLMs, or fine tune them as you said. And yes, fine tuning the open weight falls into creation process, as they are rebuild. That is not the same as an end user who downloads the final usable product. And yes, it makes sense.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
    •
  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    the original comment says "We should be able to retrain local models so they can develop an actual experience without prefilling the context." - it turns out we can. Not sure why you're trying to attach labels of user vs creator, when the premise already mentions retraining.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent