ChatGPT Has ‘Goblin’ Mania in the US. In China It Will ‘Catch You Steadily’

Are 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 platform that also owns Temu. The phenomenon where models latch onto a specific phrase and overuse them to the point that they feel forced is called “mode collapse,” says Max Spero, cofounder and CEO of Pangram, an AI writing detection tool. It’s usually caused by post-training where AI labs give LLMs feedback on their responses. “We don't know how to say: ‘This is good writing, but if we do this good writing thing 10 times, then it's no longer good writing,’” Spero says. Becoming a Meme The phrase “I will catch you steadily” comes up so often in ChatGPT’s responses that it has become a meme on the Chinese internet. One image depicts the chatbot as an inflatable rescue airbag, eagerly waiting to catch people as they fall. Zeng Fanyu, a 20-year-old developer from Chongqing, China, tells WIRED the meme inspired him to develop an April Fools’ project called Jiezhu, or “catch” in Chinese. Jiezhu is an open-source-prompt engineering tool that helps chatbots understand a user’s intention. “The idea for Jiezhu was so funny that I had a lot of motivation when I was developing it,” Zeng says. When he used ChatGPT to help with coding, the chatbot once again used the phrase jiezhu in its responses, completely unprompted. OpenAI is aware of the meme. When releasing its new image model in April, one of the sample images shared by the company actually made fun of the phenomenon. In the picture, which resembles a comic book, Boyuan Chen, a Chinese researcher at OpenAI, depicts…