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If you can say the name “David Mayer,” you have already one-upped ChatGPT. Users noticed this weekend that OpenAI’s chatbot produced an error message and ended its chat window every time it was asked to repeat the unassuming name.
Was it a software bug? Conspiracy? Ex-lover enacting revenge? Internet users took to Reddit and other social platforms to pose some theories that the block was related to a notable person with the name:
- The playwright David Mayer was mistakenly placed on a US sanction list after an ISIS member used the name as an alias.
- There is a British adventurer—and heir to the Rothschild fortune—named David Mayer de Rothschild, but the chatbot is cool with discussing his accomplishments when the whole name is typed out.
Another theory: Someone named David Mayer managed to scrub himself from ChatGPT’s model via a “right to be forgotten” policy, which allows someone to request that their private info be removed from the internet. After the Mayer debacle was discovered, users realized that a number of other names—including legal scholar Jonathan Turley, whom the chatbot accused of a fictitious crime—made ChatGPT melt down in the same way.
The actual reason: OpenAI eventually said the David Mayer mystery was due to a glitch that mistakenly flagged the name.—MM
Source: ChatGPT couldn’t handle the name ‘David Mayer’
