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

Do you too online in 2026 if you have never heard of ChatGPT? It likes it donkeysdashes, and “it’s not A; it’s B” sentence structure. But what you might not know is that the chatbot also has a lot of strange words it likes to say in Chinese, and it’s driving Chinese users crazy.

ChatGPT does a good job of answering questions in Chinese, which is why it is widely used in China despite being banned by the government. But when users make a request, whether it’s a math problem or drawing pictures, the chatbot tends to respond: 报话寄寄地接住你, which means “I’ll catch you steady (if you fall).”

Hold on… what? A more generous translation would be, “I’ll keep you safe no matter what comes.” But to any Chinese speaker, these words are affectionate and inappropriate. Sometimes, the artist is very serious and says in Chinese: “I am right here: don’t hide, don’t leave, don’t deviate, don’t run. I will be steady 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 a well-known example of many expressions that OpenAI models have shown when speaking to Chinese people. Another sign that’s been talked about a lot on social media is how the model likes to say 笶一刀 (“Help me cut once”), a catchphrase that’s ubiquitous on PDD, a major Chinese platform that also owns Temu.

The phenomenon in which models pick up on certain words and overuse them until they become compulsive is called “collapse,” says Max Spero, founder and CEO of Pangram, an AI handwriting recognition tool. It is often the result of post-graduate courses where AI labs provide LLM solutions for their solutions. “We don’t know how to say: ‘This writing is good, but if we do this good writing 10 times, then it’s not good writing anymore,'” Spero says.

Being a Meme

The phrase “take it easy” comes up so often in ChatGPT responses that it has become very popular on the Chinese Internet. One image shows a chatbot like an inflatable rescue airbaghe eagerly waits to catch people as they fall.

Zeng Fanyu, a 20-year-old software developer from Chongqing, China, tells WIRED that the meme inspired him to create an April Fools’ project called. Jiezhuor “hold” in Chinese. Jiezhu is an open source technology tool that helps chatbots understand user intent. “Jiezhu’s idea was so funny that I had a lot of inspiration when I was developing it,” Zeng says. When they used ChatGPT to help with writing, the chatbots used the text as well jeezhu in his answers, not fully answered.

OpenAI knows about memes. When releasing his new image in April, one of the photos the model shared with the company really laughed at the surprise. In picturewhich resembles a comic book, Boyuan Chen, a Chinese researcher at OpenAI, shows himself looking dismayed that this new cartoon has learned to say the same words. “This phrase has been remembered as a strange but funny Chinese phrase that GPT likes to use on the Chinese Internet,” he said quickly.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Is This Version Bad?

There are two reasons why ChatGPT has become so popular with the slogan “I’ll catch you slowly.” The first is that it may be the result of an unclear translation.

Several people I spoke to felt that the phrase had the same meaning as “I got you,” which is as clear as any response in English. But when the words “I’ve got you” in English read short and concise; “I will hold you slowly” in Chinese sounds like words and desperate. Another user checked their social media profile to show me that the brand says it often jeezhuA Chinese word meaning “to grasp,” rather than perhaps to say “to understand,” meaning not to understand what might be. jeezhu means in real situations.