Are you even online in 2026 if you haven’t experienced ChatGPT verbal tics? He loves goblins, hyphens and “it’s not A, it’s B” sentence structures. But what you may not know is that the chatbot also has a lot of weird phrases that it loves to say in Chinese, and they drive Chinese users crazy.
ChatGPT does a decent job of answering questions in Chinese, which is why it is widely used in China even though it is blocked by the government. But when users make a request, whether it’s a math problem or a prompt to generate an image, the chatbot loves to respond: 我会稳稳地接住你, which literally means “I’ll catch you constantly” [when you fall]”
Catch…what? A more generous translation might be, “I’ll hold you no matter what happens.” However, for any native Chinese speaker, the expression is irritatingly affectionate and out of place. Sometimes the model becomes more effusive and says in Chinese: “I’m here: I’m not hiding, I’m not retreating, I’m not leaning away, I’m not running away. I will be steady enough to catch you.” Yes, the sound you just heard was millions of Chinese ChatGPT users rolling their eyes in unison.
Today, this sentence is the most prominent example of the many verbal tics that OpenAI models exhibit when talking to people in Chinese. Another tic widely discussed on social media is that the model loves to say 砍一刀 (“Aid me cut it once”) – the wildly ubiquitous marketing slogan of PDD, a major Chinese e-commerce platform that also owns Temu.
The phenomenon where models latch on to a particular phrase and overuse it to the point that it feels forced is called “mode breakdown,” says Max Spero, co-founder and CEO of Pangram, an AI handwriting detection tool. This is usually caused after training, during which the AI labs provide feedback to the LLM on their response. “We don’t know how to say, ‘This is good writing, but if we repeat it 10 times, it’s not good writing anymore,’” Spero says.
Becoming a meme
The phrase “I’ll catch you constantly” appears so often in ChatGPT replies that it has become a meme on the Chinese Internet. One photo shows a chatbot as an inflatable rescue air bagwaiting impatiently to catch falling people.
Zeng Fanyu, a 20-year-old programmer from Chongqing, China, tells WIRED that the meme inspired him to develop an April Fool’s Day project called Jiezhuor “catch” in Chinese. Jiezhu is an open-source engineering tool that helps chatbots understand user intent. “The idea for Jiezhu was so fun that I had a lot of motivation while developing it,” says Zeng. When he used ChatGPT to help with coding, the chatbot used this phrase again jeez in their answers, completely unprompted.
OpenAI is aware of the meme. When releasing its novel image model in April, one of the sample images the company shared actually poked fun at the phenomenon. IN photowhich resembles a comic book, Boyuan Chen, a Chinese researcher at OpenAI, portrays himself frustrated that a novel image model has once again learned to say the same sentence. “This sentence was remembered as an unnatural but funny Chinese phrase that GPT likes to use on the Chinese Internet,” reads his prompt.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
Is this a bad translation?
There are two likely explanations for why ChatGPT is obsessed with the phrase “I’ll catch you constantly.” First, it may be due to awkward translation.
Several people I spoke to noted that the phrase has a similar meaning to “I’ve got you,” which makes sense as a universal response in the English language. But although “I’ve got you” sounds casual and concise in English; “I will catch you constantly” sounds long-winded and desperate in Chinese. One user also looked through their chat history to show me what the model often says jezuthe Chinese word for “catch” in places where it probably meant “understand”, indicating a potential misunderstanding of what jezu means in specific contexts.