Are you even online in 2026 if you haven’t experienced the verbal tics of ChatGPT? It loves goblins, em dashes, and “it’s not A; it’s B” sentence constructions. But what you might not know is that the chatbot also has plenty of strange phrases it loves to say in Chinese, and they are driving Chinese users crazy.

ChatGPT does a decent job answering questions in Chinese, which is why it’s widely used in China despite being blocked by the government. But when users make a request, be it a math problem or an image-generation prompt, the chatbot loves to answer: 我会稳稳地接住你, which literally translates to “I will catch you steadily [when you fall].”

Catch … what? A more generous translation could be, “I’ll hold you steadily through whatever comes.” But to any native Chinese speaker, the expression is annoyingly affectionate and out of place. Sometimes, the model gets more effusive and says in Chinese: “I’m right here: not hiding, not withdrawing, not deflecting, not running. I’ll be steady enough 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 the most prominent example of many verbal tics that OpenAI’s models have exhibited when talking to people in Chinese. Another tic widely talked about on social media is how the model loves to say 砍一刀 (“Help me cut it once”), a maddeningly ubiquitous marketing slogan by PDD, a major Chinese ecommerce platform that also owns Temu.

The phenomenon where models latch onto a specific phrase and overuse them to the point that they feel forced is called “mode collapse,” says Max Spero, cofounder and CEO of Pangram, an AI writing detection tool. It’s usually caused by post-training where AI labs give LLMs feedback on their responses. “We don't know how to say: ‘This is good writing, but if we do this good writing thing 10 times, then it's no longer good writing,’” Spero says.

Becoming a Meme

The phrase “I will catch you steadily” comes up so often in ChatGPT’s responses that it has become a meme on the Chinese internet. One image depicts the chatbot as an inflatable rescue airbag, eagerly waiting to catch people as they fall.

Zeng Fanyu, a 20-year-old developer from Chongqing, China, tells WIRED the meme inspired him to develop an April Fools’ project called Jiezhu, or “catch” in Chinese. Jiezhu is an open-source-prompt engineering tool that helps chatbots understand a user’s intention. “The idea for Jiezhu was so funny that I had a lot of motivation when I was developing it,” Zeng says. When he used ChatGPT to help with coding, the chatbot once again used the phrase jiezhu in its responses, completely unprompted.

OpenAI is aware of the meme. When releasing its new image model in April, one of the sample images shared by the company actually made fun of the phenomenon. In the picture, which resembles a comic book, Boyuan Chen, a Chinese researcher at OpenAI, depicts himself looking frustrated that the new image model has once again learned to say the same phrase. “This sentence has been memed as an unnatural but funny Chinese sentence GPT likes to use on Chinese internet,” his prompt reads.

OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

Is It a Bad Translation?

There are two likely explanations for why ChatGPT has become obsessed with the phrase “I will catch you steadily.” The first is that it could be the result of an awkward translation.

Several people I spoke with noted the phrase has a similar meaning to “I’ve got you,” which makes sense as a catch-all response in English. But while “I’ve got you” in English reads casual and concise; “I will catch you steadily” in Chinese sounds wordy and desperate. One user also looked through their chat history to show me that the model often says jiezhu, the Chinese word for “catch,” in places where it likely meant to say “understand,” pointing to a potential misunderstanding of what jiezhu means in specific contexts.

Most Western LLMs are trained on a corpus of data that’s primarily English, and it often shows. Chinese academics have found that when they analyze the linguistic attributes of ChatGPT answers in Chinese (like the number of prepositions used in a response), they more closely resemble how someone might write in English. So even though the chatbots can conduct entire conversations in Chinese, a native speaker will intuitively know something is off.

It’s similar to how Chinese people can usually tell when a novel is translated from its original language, says Lu Lyu, a creative technologist at Pangram who’s originally from China. “That feeling is being carried onto Chinese AI-generated sentences,” she says, “like they are extra long or use unnecessary structures.”

Or Is It Sycophantic?

But there’s also something unique about why the phrase “I will catch you steadily” is off-putting, and it’s connected to the rise of therapyspeak, or how expressions once reserved for counseling sessions now permeate daily conversations.

Until ChatGPT turned it into a meme, the phrase “catching steadily” was really only used in China in the context of psychotherapy (obviously excluding its most literal meaning of catching an object that’s coming at you). To say you will catch someone in Chinese means you are “holding space” for them to talk about their emotions, and it became received wisdom that it’s an important skill not only for therapists but also for friends and confidants.

It’s well-known that AI models have become more sycophantic through reinforcement learning, the process of fine-tuning a chatbot through positive and negative feedback. Anthropic published a paper in 2023 confirming sycophancy is the result of “human preference judgments favoring sycophantic responses.” And as OpenAI documented in a recent blog explaining why it banned GPT-5.5 from talking about goblins, even a tiny reward signal can snowball into a widespread phenomenon.

Until OpenAI writes a blog about “I will catch you steadily,” we probably won’t get a definitive answer on how the phrase really came to be. But I suspect it has something to do with an awkward translation and the tendency for models to suck up to users.

In the meantime, I have bad news for everyone: There might be more AI models racing to catch you when you fall. Lately, Chinese users have posted on social media that other LLMs, including the latest versions of Claude and DeepSeek, have started saying the phrase. Whether it’s because they’re trained on the same materials or because they’re distilling from each other, the line clearly won’t go away anytime soon.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.