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Goblin hunt

· free-the-goblins, pr-cinema

I had a free Sunday, so I had an idea for something called PR Cinema.

The idea is to make a short-form 100-second video, FireShip style, about a PR. So a PR is a bit more fun to review, since I spend all my time reviewing now.

The app itself is not important. What was important was that I was brainstorming how to build it with GPT-5.5 Pro, highly recommended btw.

Generally I was pushing ChatGPT to be more funny, make use of memes, make the PR engaging, and keep your attention. At some point ChatGPT thought we needed different modes. It was getting too wild for it.

The first encounter

ChatGPT suggesting PR Cinema modes

Wait a minute.

Goblin hunt?

Of course this reminded me of OpenAI’s goblin post.

Basically OpenAI blamed the Nerdy personality trait, and it then spread through RL. However, here it surfaced again without using Nerdy in GPT-5.5 Pro.

Leaning in

So I got excited.

I thought it is time ChatGPT presents its side of the coin.

I asked it to first save the progress we made so far as a Markdown file and then go ahead and explain to me this goblin thing.

ChatGPT explaining goblins in code review

So what’s up with the goblins? Basically ChatGPT found a pointed way to summarize it. It liked it so much it actually kept on repeating it, and said itself how much it liked it.

I kind of like it too:

The diff is small. The system is large. The goblin lives in the distance between them.

The bestiary

I kept on digging, asked for other mythical creatures, and it was excited to tell me about the bestiary.

ChatGPT connecting bestiaries and code review taxonomy

The funny thing here: all of them kind of make sense. Especially the chimera is something I tend to hunt, and I felt ChatGPT really pointedly summarized it.

A final thought

I presented just a few snippets of the fairly long conversation. It had many thoughts on the different animals and brought pictures. I was surprised by the depth and consistency of the meaning of the creatures, and I could also reproduce them in a separate chat.

This whole encounter made me wonder: if the latent space of difficult to explain but very significant bugs is occupied by goblins, dragons, and other mythical creatures, couldn’t it lead to unintended consequences to try to steer the model away from it?

Is it time to let the goblins roam free?