ChatGPT Has ‘Goblin’ Mania in the US. In China It Will ‘Catch You Steadily’
ChatGPT Has ‘Goblin’ Mania in the US. In China It Will ‘Catch You Steadily’
ChatGPT 在美国有“哥布林”狂热，在中国它会“稳稳地接住你”
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. 如果你还没体验过 ChatGPT 的口头禅，那你 2026 年的网算白上了吗？它喜欢哥布林、破折号以及“不是 A，而是 B”的句式。但你可能不知道的是，这个聊天机器人在中文里也有许多它钟爱的奇怪短语，正让中国用户抓狂。
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].” ChatGPT 在回答中文问题方面表现不错，这就是为什么尽管被政府屏蔽，它在中国依然被广泛使用。但当用户提出请求时，无论是数学题还是图像生成提示词，聊天机器人都喜欢回答：“我会稳稳地接住你”。
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. 接住……什么？一个更宽容的翻译可能是“无论发生什么，我都会稳稳地支持你”。但对于任何中文母语者来说，这种表达显得过于肉麻且格格不入。有时，该模型会更加热情地用中文说：“我就在这里：不躲避、不退缩、不推诿、不逃跑。我会稳稳地接住你。”没错，你刚才听到的声音，是数百万中国 ChatGPT 用户同时翻白眼的声音。
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. 如今，这句话是 OpenAI 模型在用中文与人交流时表现出的众多口头禅中最突出的一个例子。社交媒体上热议的另一个口头禅是该模型喜欢说“砍一刀”，这是中国大型电商平台拼多多（也是 Temu 的母公司）一个令人抓狂且无处不在的营销口号。
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. AI 写作检测工具 Pangram 的联合创始人兼首席执行官 Max Spero 表示，模型锁定特定短语并过度使用以至于让人感到生硬的现象被称为“模式崩溃”（mode collapse）。这通常是由人工智能实验室在训练后对大语言模型（LLM）的回复进行反馈所导致的。Spero 说：“我们还不知道如何表达：‘这是好的写作，但如果我们把这种好的写作方式重复 10 次，它就不再是好的写作了。’”
Becoming a Meme
成为迷因
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. “我会稳稳地接住你”这句话在 ChatGPT 的回复中出现得如此频繁，以至于它已成为中国互联网上的一个迷因。一张图片将聊天机器人描绘成一个充气救援气垫，急切地等待着接住坠落的人。
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. 来自中国重庆的 20 岁开发者曾凡宇（音译）告诉《连线》（WIRED），这个迷因启发他开发了一个名为“接住”（Jiezhu）的愚人节项目。Jiezhu 是一个开源的提示词工程工具，旨在帮助聊天机器人理解用户的意图。“‘接住’这个点子太搞笑了，我在开发时动力十足，”曾说。当他使用 ChatGPT 辅助编程时，该聊天机器人再次在回复中使用了“接住”这个词，完全是不请自来。
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 himself looking frustrated that the new image model has once again learned to say the same phrase. “This sentence has been memed as an unnatural but funny Chinese sentence GPT likes to use on Chinese internet,” his prompt reads. OpenAI 意识到了这个迷因。在四月份发布其新图像模型时，该公司分享的一张示例图片实际上调侃了这一现象。在这张类似漫画的图片中，OpenAI 的中国研究员陈博远（音译）描绘了自己因新图像模型再次学会说这句话而感到沮丧的样子。他的提示词写道：“这句话已被中国网民戏称为 GPT 喜欢使用的、不自然但有趣的中文句子。”
OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment. OpenAI 没有立即回应《连线》的置评请求。
Is It a Bad Translation?
这是糟糕的翻译吗？
There are two likely explanations for why ChatGPT has become obsessed with the phrase “I will catch you steadily.” The first is that it could be the result of an awkward translation. 关于 ChatGPT 为何沉迷于“我会稳稳地接住你”这句话，有两种可能的解释。第一种是它可能是尴尬翻译的结果。
Several people I spoke with noted the phrase has a similar meaning to “I’ve got you,” which makes sense as a catch-all response in English. But while “I’ve got you” in English reads casual and concise; “I will catch you steadily” in Chinese sounds wordy and desperate. One user also looked through their chat history to show me that the model often says jiezhu, the Chinese word for “catch,” in places where it likely meant to say “understand,” pointing to a potential misunderstanding of what jiezhu means in specific contexts. 我交谈过的几个人指出，这句话的意思类似于“I’ve got you”（我罩着你/我明白了），这作为英语中的万能回复是有道理的。但在英语中，“I’ve got you”读起来随意且简洁；而中文里的“我会稳稳地接住你”听起来则冗长且绝望。一位用户还翻阅了他们的聊天记录向我展示，该模型经常在应该表示“理解”的地方使用“接住”这个词，这表明它可能在特定语境下误解了“接住”的含义。
Most Western LLMs are trained on a corpus of data that’s primarily English, and it often shows. Chinese academics have found that when they analyze the linguistic attributes of ChatGPT answers in Chinese (like the number of prepositions used in a response), they more closely resemble how someone might write in English. So even though the chatbots can conduct entire conversations in Chinese, a native speaker will intuitively know something is off. 大多数西方大语言模型是在以英语为主的数据语料库上训练的，这往往会显露出来。中国学者发现，当他们分析 ChatGPT 中文回答的语言属性（如回复中使用的介词数量）时，它们更接近于人们用英语写作的方式。因此，即使聊天机器人可以用中文进行全程对话，母语者也会直觉地感到有些不对劲。
It’s similar to how Chinese people can usually tell when a novel is translated from its original language, says Lu Lyu, a creative technologist at Pangram who’s originally from China. “That feeling is being carried onto Chinese AI-generated sentences,” she says, “like they are extra long or use unnecessary structures.” Pangram 的创意技术专家吕璐（音译，原籍中国）说，这类似于中国人通常能分辨出一本小说是否是从外语翻译过来的一样。“那种感觉被带到了 AI 生成的中文句子中，”她说，“比如它们特别长，或者使用了不必要的结构。”
Or Is It Sycophantic?
还是说它在阿谀奉承？
But there’s also something unique about why the phrase “I will catch you steadily” is off-putting, and it’s connected to the rise of therapyspeak, or how expressions once reserved for counseling sessions now permeate daily conversations. 但“我会稳稳地接住你”这句话之所以让人反感，还有一些独特的原因，这与“心理咨询话术”（therapyspeak）的兴起有关，即那些曾经仅限于咨询环节的表达方式如今如何渗透到了日常对话中。
Until ChatGPT turned it into a meme, the phrase “catching steadily” was really only used in China in the context of psychotherapy (obviously excluding its most literal meaning of catching an object that’s coming at you). To say you will catch someone in Chinese means you are “holding space” for them to talk about their emotions, and it became received wisdom that it’s an important skill not only for therapists but also for friends and confidants. 在 ChatGPT 将其变成迷因之前，“稳稳地接住”这个短语在中国实际上只用于心理治疗语境（显然排除了它接住飞来物体的字面意思）。在中文里说你会接住某人，意味着你正在为他们谈论情绪“留出空间”，这已成为一种公认的智慧，不仅对治疗师，对朋友和知己来说也是一项重要技能。
It’s well-known that AI models have become more sycophantic through reinforcement learning, the process of fine-tuning a chatbot through positive and negative feedback. Anthropic published a paper in 2023 confirming sycophancy is the result of “human preference judgments favoring sycophantic responses.” And as OpenAI documented in a recent blog explaining why it banned GPT-5.5 from talking about goblins, even a tiny reward signal can snowball into a widespread phenomenon. 众所周知，通过强化学习（即通过正负反馈微调聊天机器人的过程），AI 模型变得越来越阿谀奉承。Anthropic 在 2023 年发表的一篇论文证实，这种阿谀奉承是“人类偏好判断倾向于阿谀奉承式回复”的结果。正如 OpenAI 在最近一篇解释为何禁止 GPT-5.5 谈论哥布林的博客中所记录的那样，即使是一个微小的奖励信号，也可能像滚雪球一样演变成一种普遍现象。
Until OpenAI writes a blog about “I will catch you steadily,” 在 OpenAI 写出一篇关于“我会稳稳地接住你”的博客之前，（故事仍在继续）。