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 a prompt to create an image, the chatbot likes to answer: 我会稳稳地接住你, which literally translates to “I’ll hold you steady.” [when you fall]”.
Catch…what? A more generous translation would be: “I will support you steadfastly through all that comes.” But to any native Chinese speaker, this expression is annoyingly affectionate and out of place. Sometimes, the model becomes more impulsive and says in Chinese: “I’m here: I don’t hide, I don’t retreat, I don’t swerve, I don’t run. I’ll be steady enough to catch you.” Yes, the sound you just heard is millions of Chinese ChatGPT users moving their eyes at the same time.
Today, this sentence is the most prominent example of the many verbal tics that OpenAI models have shown when speaking to people in Chinese. Another widely talked about tic on social media is the way a model likes to say 砍一刀 (“Help me cut it once”), an insanely ubiquitous marketing slogan by PDD, the major Chinese e-commerce platform that also owns Temu.
The phenomenon in which models latch on to a particular phrase and overuse it to the point that they feel forced into it is called “mode breakdown,” says Max Spiro, co-founder and CEO of Pangram, an AI typing detection tool. This is usually due to post-training where AI labs provide feedback to MBA students on their responses. “We don’t know how to say, ‘This is good writing,’ but if we do this good writing thing 10 times, it’s no longer good writing,” Spiro says.
Become a meme
The phrase “I’ll hold you steady” appears so often in ChatGPT replies that it has become a meme on the Chinese Internet. One image shows the chatbot as an inflatable airbag, eagerly waiting to catch people as they fall.
Zheng Fanyu, a 20-year-old developer from Chongqing, China, tells WIRED that the meme inspired him to develop an April Fools’ project called Jiezhu, or “hunting” in Chinese. Jiezhu is a fast, open source engineering tool that helps chatbots understand user intent. “The idea for Jiezhu was so funny that I had a lot of motivation when I was developing it,” Zeng says. When ChatGPT was used to help with programming, the chatbot used this phrase again jiezhu In her responses, she is completely spontaneous.
OpenAI is aware of the meme. When the new photo model was launched in April, one photo model shared by the company poked fun at the phenomenon. In the image, which resembles a comic book, Boyuan Chen, a Chinese researcher at OpenAI, depicts himself looking frustrated as the new image model has once again learned to say the same phrase. “This sentence has been misquoted as an unnatural but funny Chinese sentence that GPT likes to use on the Chinese Internet,” his message read.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Is it a bad translation?
There are two possible explanations for why ChatGPT is so obsessed with the phrase “I’ll hold you steady.” The first is that it could be the result of inappropriate translation.
Several people I spoke to noted that the phrase has a similar meaning to “I’ve got you,” which makes sense as a blanket answer in English. But while the phrase “I’ve got you” in English reads informally and concisely; “I will hold you steady” in Chinese sounds desperate and hopeless. One user also looked at his chat history to show me that the model often says jiezhuthe Chinese word for “catch”, in places it likely means saying “grasp”, suggesting a possible misunderstanding of what jiezhu Meaning in specific contexts.
