Language models are weird for the same reason human cultures are weird

Cultures of the world, photographed by Irving PennIn November 2025, shortly after OpenAI released GPT-5.1—a new model that promised “a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT”—a small set of users started to notice something weird. GPT-5.1 was indeed smarter and more conversational; but it also had a strange habit of referring to things as “goblins.” For a time this was treated as a quirk—language models, after all, do all sorts of strange things—and nobody gave it much thought. But soon things started to get stranger.With each new model release in the months that followed—5.2 in December, 5.3 in February, 5.4 in March, 5.5 in April—OpenAI’s models became more and more insistent on talking about goblins. Soon the bestiary expanded to include not only goblins but also gremlins, trolls, ogres, raccoons, and pigeons; and by the early months of 2026, the goblin tic had become prominent enough to be disruptive. Contractual liabilities were “legal goblins”; the debugging process meant hunting…