There is probably a whole testing workflow at AI companies to tweak each new model until it "looks" acceptable.
But they still don't understand what they are doing. This is purely empirical.
Isn't that what the RLHF phase does ( https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/what-is-rlhf )?
That Nerdy personality prompt made me gag. As a card-carrying Nerd, I feel offended
TL;DR the cringe nerdy shit should be (optionally) switched on at inference, not as part of RL
As the article says, the personalities weren't supposed to affect other personalities. OpenAI was as surprised by the goblins as you are. Training can be tricky.
The first time it said something along the lines of "let's use these options to avoid future gremlins haunting you", I sort of rolled my eyes but it was okay, I thought its attempt to sound endearing almost cute. A bit of a "hello fellow kids" attempt at sounding nerdy.
It quickly became noise though. It was extremely overused. Sometimes multiple mentions to goblins in the same reply.
I don't really have an opinion about it, but I sort of came to prefer a more neutral tone instead.