ChatGPT’s Repetitive Chinese Phrases Are Frustrating Users—and Spawning Memes

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot, has developed a habit of repeating certain Chinese phrases—osourcesen in situations where native speakers say the wording feels awkward or out of place—fueling user frustration and a wave of memes.

One widely cited example is “我会稳稳地接住你” (Wǒ huì wěnwěn de jiē zhù nǐ), which translates literally as “I will catch you steadily.” Some users interpret it as reassurance akin to “I’ve got you,” but Chinese speakers have described the phrasing as overly affectionate, verbose, and unnatural in many contexts.

Users also report seeing “砍一刀” (Kǎn yī dāo) appear repeatedly in ChatGPT’s Chinese replies. The phrase is known as a marketing slogan associated with Chinese e-commerce platform PDD.

Possible explanations

Observers have pointed to “mode collapse,” a phenomenon in which a model latches onto certain wording and overuses it. In the source report, Max Spero, cofounder and CEO of Pangram, linked this kind of repetition to post-training feedback processes that can inadvertently reward particular styles of phrasing.

The source report outlines two likely reasons the recurring sentence may show up so frequently:

• Awkward translation: The phrase may be a literal or overly direct rendering of a casual English reassurance like “I’ve got you,” which can sound concise in English but emotionally intense or wordy in Chinese.
• English-heavy training data: Many Western large language models are trained primarily on English text, and researchers have found that Chinese responses can reflect English-like linguistic patterns even when they are grammatically correct.

According to the source report, OpenAI is aware the phrasing has become a meme, with internal teams referencing it in sample outputs for new models.