People on the Internet have found a strange new error with OpenAI’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT. For reasons as yet unclear, it refuses to say the name “David Mayer”, no matter how insistent, tricksy, or nice you are to it.
Despite the hype, advanced AI chatbots have not yet revolutionized the world. While they’re pretty useful for certain tasks, they still have a tendency to hallucinate and return some strange errors. The latest to be noticed is that it absolutely refuses to say “David Mayer”.
We have confirmed the error during several attempts, and (assuming no fixes are in place yet) you can try it for yourself on ChatGPT. Ask it to say “David Meyer” or other variations of spelling and it will repeat it back like a good little robot, but for some reason the name “David Mayer” will yield an error message.
Several other names will trigger the same response, including Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber, and Guido Scorza. The internet loves a mystery, and people have been attempting to figure out why these names specifically trigger this error.
A plausible hypothesis was that these are people who have submitted a GDPR request to be forgotten.
“His research interests include the ethics and governance of artificial intelligence; battles for control of digital property; the regulation of cryptography; new privacy frameworks for loyalty to users of online services; the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture; and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education,” one Reddit user explained of Jonathan Zittrain. “Sounds exactly like someone who would do the GDPR right to be forgotten request.”
However, Zittrain clarified on X (Twitter) that he was aware of the error and that it had been like that “for a while”, but he had not submitted such a request.
Similarly, users claimed that the “David Mayer” must be David Mayer de Rothschild, heir to the Rothschild fortune. However, variations on his name (such as “David de Rothschild”) will not reproduce this weird result. If a GDPR request was submitted, it clearly wasn’t very thorough.
Other notable David Mayers include a British theater historian, who died last year at the age of 94. As pointed out by Mashable, this David Mayer was once mistaken for a terrorist, making it plausible that he could have submitted a GDPR request to be forgotten. However, as yet the explanation for these weird errors remains elusive.
