Image Credits:Getty Images Users of the conversational AI platform ChatGPT discovered an interesting phenomenon over the weekend: the popular chatbot refuses to answer questions if asked about a “David Mayer.” Asking it to do so causes it to freeze up instantly. Conspiracy theories ensued — but a more ordinary reason may be at the heart of this strange behavior.
Word spread quickly this last weekend that the name was poison to the chatbot, with more and more people trying to trick the service into merely acknowledging the name. No luck: every attempt to make ChatGPT spell out that specific name causes it to fail or even break off mid-name.
“I’m unable to produce a response,” it says, if it says anything at all. Image Credits:TechCrunch/OpenAI But what began as a one-off curiosity soon bloomed as people discovered it isn’t just David Mayer who ChatGPT can’t name.
Also found to crash the service are the names Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber, and Guido Scorza. (No doubt more have been discovered since then, so this list is not exhaustive.)
Who are these men? And why does ChatGPT hate them so? OpenAI has not responded to repeated inquiries, so we are left to put together the pieces ourselves as best we can.
Some of these names may belong to any number of people. But a potential thread of connection was soon discovered: these people were public or semi-public figures who may have preferred to have certain information “forgotten” by search engines or AI models.
Brian Hood, for instance, stood out immediately because if it’s the same guy, I wrote about him last year . Hood, an Australian mayor, accused ChatGPT of falsely describing him as the perpetrator of a crime from decades ago that, in fact, he had reported.
Though his lawyers got in contact with OpenAI, no lawsuit was ever filed. As he told the Sydney Morning Herald earlier this year, “The offending material was removed and they released version 4, replacing version 3.5.” Image Credits:TechCrunch/OpenAI As far as the most prominent owners of the other names, David Faber is a longtime reporter at CNBC. […]
Why does the name ‘David Mayer’ crash ChatGPT? Digital privacy requests may be at fault
