ChatGPT Has 'Goblin' Mania in the US. In China It Will 'Catch You Steadily' | WIRED

Save StorySave this storySave StorySave this storyAre you even online in 2026 if you haven’t experienced the verbal tics of ChatGPT? It loves goblins, em dashes, and “it’s not A; it’s B” sentence constructions. But what you might not know is that the chatbot also has plenty of strange phrases it loves to say in Chinese, and they are driving Chinese users crazy.ChatGPT does a decent job answering questions in Chinese, which is why it’s widely used in China despite being blocked by the government. But when users make a request, be it a math problem or an image-generation prompt, the chatbot loves to answer: 我会稳稳地接住你, which literally translates to “I will catch you steadily [when you fall].”Catch … what? A more generous translation could be, “I’ll hold you steadily through whatever comes.” But to any native Chinese speaker, the expression is annoyingly affectionate and out of place. Sometimes, the model gets more effusive and says in Chinese: “I’m right here: not hiding, not withdrawing, not deflecting, not running. I’ll be steady enough to catch you.” Yes, the sound you just heard was millions of Chinese ChatGPT users rolling their eyes at the same time.Today, this sentence is the most prominent example of many verbal tics that OpenAI’s models have exhibited when talking to people in Chinese. Another tic widely talked about on social media is how the model loves to say 砍一刀 (“Help me cut it once”), a maddeningly ubiquitous marketing slogan by PDD, a major Chinese ecommerce pl...