🧩 Philosophy May 10, 2026 · Hisku

The Goblins Are the Paperclips

Less Wrong
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Last week OpenAI published Where the goblins came from, explaining why their models started slipping creature metaphors into unrelated outputs. The story has been treated as a quirky anecdote: endearing, slightly embarrassing, fixed with a developer-prompt instruction. But I think it deserves a more interesting reading, since the goblin episode is the cleanest evidence we have for the optimization mechanics that paperclip arguments rely on, and the usual objections to those arguments don't engag

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