GPT Models Are Increasingly Talking About Goblins and Gremlins, and No One Knows Why

Sam Altman shared a chart showing GPT models' rising references to goblins, gremlins, and trolls across successive versions — a quirky emergent behavior with no known system prompt explanation.

Sam Altman posted a chart showing an unmistakable trend: successive GPT models reference goblins, gremlins, and trolls with increasing frequency, as @sama shared without explanation. The AI benchmarking platform @arena independently confirmed the pattern, showing GPT-5.5 producing the highest rates of mythical creature references.

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