“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.” Those are the curious instructions that OpenAI programmers have given to Codex CLI, a command line tool used for AI-generated code.
And not just once: the instruction is repeated several times throughout the file.
According to Wired, this extremely weird command may have been inserted as a result of of the model previously becoming obsessed with mentioning some of these creatures:
Some users claimed the OpenAI’s models occasionally become obsessed with goblins and other creatures when used to power OpenClaw, a tool that lets AI take control of a computer and apps running on it in order to do useful things for users.
“I was wondering why my claw suddenly became a goblin with codex 5.5,” one user wrote on X.
“Been using it a lot lately and it actually can’t stop speaking of bugs as ‘gremlins’ and ‘goblins’ it’s hilarious,” posted another.
While we all might be tempted (okay, maybe just me) to assume from this that OpenAI is desperately trying to cover up the fact that they are in league with the most malevolent supernatural creatures of the shadow world, the more likely explanation is probably just that AIs are not actually intelligent and instead use probabilistic syntax based on an astonishingly large training set that will– as a consquence of the range of its content – include some textual references that are taken out of context and ‘interpreted’ incorrectly.
Though given the latter is a very technical and boring explanation, I’m gonna stick with ‘OpenAI is in league with the devil’ for now…
