OpenAI Really Wants Codex to Shut Up About Goblins

"Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant," reads OpenAI's coding agent instructions. OpenAI has a goblin problem. Instructions designed to guide the behavior of the company's latest model as it writes code have been revealed to include a line, repeated several times, that specifically forbids it from randomly mentioning an assortment of mythical and real creatures. "Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query," read instructions in Codex CLI, a command-line tool for using AI to generate code. It is unclear why OpenAI felt compelled to spell this out for Codex --or indeed why its models might want to discuss goblins or pigeons in the first place.