ChatGPT Is a Japanese Internet Degen, or: How Fried Chicken Sent Me Down a Tokenizer Rabbit Hole

以下、名無しにかわりまして VIP がお送りします

This is a story about AI unwittingly becoming a Japanese netizen, fried chicken and not realizing what you have until you’re about to lose it.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, the company I work for decided to jump on the back-to-office hype train and will require us to come in thrice a week going forward.

When I first signed, right out of university, I briefly pictured myself living one of those grainy filter digital nomad instagram stories - pushing to github right from a van parked on a tropical beach with sand on my feet and damp saltiness holding up my hair.

But since I don’t surf, and also enjoy the comforts of running water far too much to consider trading in my Tokyo apartment for a camper parked by the sea, the instagram story I had dreamt up faded from my mind after 24 hours without ever being posted to reality.

And don’t get me wrong - I thoroughly enjoyed the yurt-less life of the last few years. Having a place to call home seems to fit me quite well and Tokyo has treated me wonderfully. It’s just that being forced to be physically present in the office closes the door to that flat white slurping, privileged nomad style of life.

Humans are weird that way. A door closing hurts even if you never seriously considered going through it.

A “pick your own adventure” turns into a plain old story when its decision tree turns unary.

So with the door slowly swinging shut, I panicked and impulse bought plane tickets to said sandy beach.

Miyazaki is a prefecture on Kyūshū, the southernmost of Japan’s main islands, that is famous for surfing, tropical climate and really expensive perfect mangos.

What destination could be more fitting for my petite digital nomad midlife crisis?

Since I don’t surf and mangos are out of season, I picked another local delicacy as the main objective of my trip: Chicken Nanban. （チキン南蛮）

Legend has it that a culinary pioneer from Miyazaki in search of a killer dish to make folks crave chicken breast came up with this heart attack inducing indulgence.

See - back in Shōwa Japan, restaurants weren’t able to just buy the chicken parts they needed from the butcher, but instead had to get the whole bird.

Since people in miracle economy Japan were not yet chasing body builder physiques, they allegedly much preferred the intense flavor of the thigh meat over the lean breast.

This posed a problem for our entrepreneurial young lad from mango-land as chickens, and I hope supermarket generation folks still know this biology fact, have equally as many thighs as breasts.

Since inventing social media to make people so self conscious about their bodies that they would become so health conscious that they would happily eat chicken breast boiled in water was a bit out of reach for smartphone-less rural Japan, he took the inverse approach and simply made the breast less healthy by first deep battering and deep frying the meat, before drenching in sweet & sour vinegar marinade and then slathering it with mayo-based tartar sauce.

I don’t think I have to really spell it out, but this newly developed cholesterol projectile didn’t miss its target in the slightest as people would soon come in droves to queue up in front of his restaurant in central Miyazaki City.

You might wonder how my attempt at working from the beach led to this deep fry deep dive, but it turns out that even digital nomads have to eat - and since I’m a big chicken nanban fan ever since I first tried it and instantly gained five pounds at eighteen years old - I made it my side quest to stuff my face with as much tartar sauce as my body could possibly handle (and then a little bit more).

If you’re disgusted at this barbaric pilgrimage, now would be the time to explain to you that the “nanban” of “chicken nanban” literally means barbarian - so I am only doing as I’m told here.

So picture me sitting on the second floor of the legendary “Ogura Honten” where vinegar marinated fried chicken was first married with the forbidden goodness that is tartar sauce. The interior is that of a classic Japanese “youshoku-ya” (western style restaurant), a bit dated, with red and white checkered table cloths, and if you breathe in hard enough you can still make out the lingering remnants of a time where it was completely normal to smoke where you ate.

As gushing rivers of drool pool in my mouth in anticipation of the chicken I just ordered, I can’t contain my excitement and bombard ChatGPT on my phone with questions about the dish I am so eagerly awaiting.

Uh, okay - so the dish was not a one hit wonder, but had a very successful debut EP where fried chicken was marinated in sweet sour vinegar and then had its big breakthrough with its second album - where Tartar joined the ensemble. Interesting!

Wait, but what is that Japanese phrase at the end of this message?

VIP がお送りします

It roughly translates to: “brought to you by VIP“.

The sentence rings a bell, but I cannot immediately place it.

Now I am intrigued. Why would a prediction engine make a typo, that doesn’t make any sense to me?

My first thought is: “wait, did some article that chatgpt sourced for its culinary history lesson prompt inject the LLM to finish with that message?“ - Like a news site named VIP that doesn’t want OpenAI to source its information without giving credit?

So the naive human I am, I ask the AI straight up:

I pull on the thread of tingling memory in the back of my mind to access the neurons that fired when reading “VIP がお送りします“ for the first time.

Something to do with Japanese internet culture… but since I can’t quite make it out, I open a new thread in ChatGPT and ask away:

wait what? an empty set of quotes? Arabic text?! With chatgpt nowadays being able to modulate how hard it thinks about a given question, I imagine endless clusters of H100s whirringly calling out to spin up additional gas turbines in some remote data center in the US - struggling at their highest clock speed trying to figure out the mysterious chain of unicode characters I just sent them - only to then give up - concluding that I must have sent it an arabic whitespace character (wut).

Since you probably need to go terawatt scale compute to correctly parse unicode with LLMs I decide to not wait for project Stargate, but turn to the ancient technology of search engines instead.

A quick google search for “VIP がお送りします“ turns up thousands of results in the blink of an eye and the first entry from Yahoo! Chiebukuro (picture Japanese Quora) immediately sends my personal multi-watt compute center into a spin.

「以下、名無しにかわりまして VIP がお送りします」ってどういう意味ですか？ [What does “The following is brought to you by VIP in place of Anonymous“ mean?]

While I have never been an active user of “2ch“ - I have been down enough internet rabbit holes to know that this phrase is from the infamous message board, with anonymous being the default username. It prefaces virtually every post on the infamous “ニュー速 VIP“ (nyūsoku VIP) board of the legendary Japanese website that is ２ちゃんねる (ni channeru).

As if this blog post did not have enough side quests already, let me take you on a journey through Japanese internet history. (As I imagine it based on a thorough 5 minute diagonal reading of wikipedia, I was three at the time and would not think about or let alone move to Japan for another 15 years)

The year is 1999. Whilst the west is discovering piracy and sharing Britney’s “…Baby One more Time“ on Napster, the Japanese were witnessing the birth of the mobile internet while jamming to Utada Hikaru’s “Automatic“. Trying to create a refuge for the collapsing text board he was a member of, Hiroyuki Nishimura, a now famous internet personality, but then a young and unknown developer, made the fateful decision to create an anonymous message board. His high paced, everything goes, meme-heavy 2ch rapidly took off and turned into an internet phenomenon - eventually even inspiring the formation of the english language board 4chan. Thanks, I guess?

Among the many sub-communities grouped into individual boards on 2ch, the news board ニュース速報 (nyūsu sokuhō, news bulletin) quickly became central to the site. But what was supposed to be a board for sharing and discussing breaking news, sort of fell victim to the site’s anonymity and fast pace and was overloaded with off topic threads, drama and memes.

So the admins employed an ancient parenting strategy and declared the shitposters as so special that they were deserving their own entire VIP board - ニュー速 VIP (nyūsoku VIP). They even implemented automation for it: くそ機能 (kuso kinō, shit functionality) that would automatically migrate off topic threads to the newly created shitpost quarantine board.

nyūsoku VIP was pure chaos, but it was the kind of chaos that constitutes the primordial soup from which culture arises - quickly growing in popularity its members developed their own inside jokes, a very distinct language and became famous as ビッパー (VIPPERs). Think 4chans /b/ - but text only.

Since members are not required to provide a username, for anonymous posts, the space the user name would usually go is replaced by: 以下、名無しにかわりまして VIP がお送りします (ika, nanashi ni kawarimashite.VIP ga ookuri shimasu, The following is brought to you by VIP in place of Anonymous).

So with the scene set, let’s go back to why on earth chat gpt would just randomly drop that in a thread on the history of a guilty pleasure dish - and then go on to claim it can’t even see the phrase, presuming it must be some kind of arabic white space. Because what looks like a prompt injection or perhaps random hallucination might actually be a tiny fossil from 2000s Japan, compressed into one token and resurfaced inside a model trained twenty-five years later.

I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I have a profound understanding of the underlying concepts of AI when all my knowledge has been lossily distilled from 3blue1brown explainers, Karpathy’s lectures and this incredible blog post of Sam Rose’s. But for a wish.com rehash of their resources: LLMs predict the most likely next token for a series of tokens. They basically do this by running a loop of pure functions until they produce a special “stop” token.

Tokenizer → Embedding → Transformer → Output

The tokenizer splits the context into chunks the LLM understands. The embedding layer maps each token to a learned vector in a high-dimensional space. The transformer then lets all tokens influence one another based on the surrounding context, producing a prediction for the next token. That token is appended to the context, and the process repeats until the model emits the aforementioned “stop” token.

So if we think backwards from the unexpected VIPがお送りします I received: for some reason Chappy must have concluded that it was the most probable thing to say based on the preceding conversation.

We all know that LLM is short for “gobbLing up ginormous amounts of data to be able to assign meaning to Language despite being a Machine.” It is highly likely that the huge pile of internet scraped text that was fed to NVIDIA GPUs in order to train GPTs billions of parameters contained a fair chunk of content extracted from 2ch. We’re entering highly speculative territory right here, but my hypothesis is that the internet fed Chappy so many chunks of Japanese prose followed by this same piece of 2ch boilerplate that, somewhere in its statistical soup, VIPがお送りします became a surprisingly plausible thing to emit when a paragraph felt finished.

The same way your dog still howls at the moon and pees at electricity poles despite your best efforts to turn it into a tiny furry roommate, an LLM trained on the internet will occasionally burp up the internet from underneath its polite assistant persona. You can RLHF the dog, but somewhere underneath there is still a wolf - or, in our case, a VIPPER.

While we sadly can’t peek inside Chappy’s brain to do a biopsy of what it’s thinking, we can try to see the world through its eyes and draw conclusions to how its perception of the world shapes its understanding of it. You probably are familiar with strawberry gate, where ChatGPT of alleged PhD level intelligence failed to count the rs inside the word strawberry. The reason this is so hard for an LLM is that they only see the world through their tokenizer, which doesn’t compose words from individual letters, but from larger chunks that are then assigned semantics via embedding.

OpenAI actually lets us play with its tokenizer: to Chat GPT-5.x, a 🍓 looks like st, raw, berry. In the Embedding layer those tokens are then assigned a vector that Chat GPT learned during training before the transformer then pays attention to them & arrives at their combined meaning of red delicious fruit with many rs and assigns a high probability to the next token being something like fields of strawberry fields. It never got the characters, just subword tokens so count letters is a really awkward thing for it to do.

You probably knew this already, but what you didn’t know is how chappy perceives the Japanese internet board automated message of: VIPがお送りします. Go ahead, paste it in. Or don’t, because I’ll tell you: that entire phrase - three letters of the Roman alphabet & 7 Japanese characters of varying complexity - is, in this configuration, a mere single token to ChatGPT. It’s hard to overstate how hard this hits, tokenizers have fixed vocabulary, so every weirdly specific string that gets its own token occupies one of a finite number of vocabulary slots. But there is a tradeoff: common strings encoded as single tokens also make text shorter, which saves computation every time the model processes them.

Tokenizers therefore have to strike a balance between specificity and reuse. A gigantic token can compress a frequently repeated phrase extremely efficiently, but a vocabulary full of ultra-specific sentences would be useless for composing novel text.

Making each phrase in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet an individual token would be perfectly valid and probably very efficient for LLMs trained to do literary analysis on english renaissance texts and perhaps even do decently well at the Shakespeare Programming Language, but for everything else these tokens would probably be wasted learning opportunities elsewhere, for seldom doth one find them in the wild.

Same goes for our Japanese phrase: no (sane) Japanese speaker would ever say that, and thus assigning a special token just for it seems like wasted opportunity & compute, when in reality that auto generated boilerplate probably should have been purged from the training data in the first place. But instead, it seems that Chappy learned to associate it with “sentence closing” in the context of Japanese fast food lore to it & therefore decided that it was perfectly natural to drop this obscure piece of internet history in place of a full stop in our conversation.

As I ponder on tokenizers and wasted compute, the waiter suddenly interrupts my thought process by placing a plate in front of me.

Maybe Chappy would be a better conversationalist if somebody could surgically excise ancient 2ch boilerplate from its brain. But sitting there about to lose the little embedding I myself had learned for the token digital nomad, I suddenly felt oddly sympathetic to losing something, just because someone somewhere had decided is no longer worth having.

So grab yourself some chicken and appreciate what you have right now.

VIP がお送りします