OpenAI confirms that the name David Mayer was flagged by an internal privacy tool and says that "in some cases, ChatGPT may not provide some of the information about people to protect their privacy."
last weekend ChatGPT After testing, users found that the AI suddenly failed to generate a response when asked to spell the name "David Mayer", which has now been fixed, but users also found that names such as "Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber and Guido Scorza" were still not generated. are still not being generated.
Whenever these names are added anywhere in the command, ChatGPT will show an "Error generating response" and the error will still occur even if the command is given in a more creative way, such as asking the AI to read the names from right to left in reverse (e.g. reyam divad).
OpenAI confirmed that the name David Mayer was flagged by an internal privacy tool and said that "in some cases, ChatGPT may not provide some of the information about people to protect their privacy," other than that the company did not explain further details.
Who are these names?
It has been hypothesized that all of these names are considered half public figures, and that they want certain information to be 'forgotten' by search engines or AI models.
TechCrunch cites the example of Brian Hood, an Australian mayor (if that's the same person), who reported last year that ChatGPT had misrepresented him as a criminal from decades ago, and whose lawyers contacted OpenAI at the time but ultimately didn't file any lawsuits, and who confirmed earlier this year that the misinformation had been removed.
Jonathan Turley, an attorney and journalist, says he was defamed by ChatGPT, and that AI fabricated a non-existent Washington Post article that incorrectly stated Turley was facing sexual harassment charges.
David Faber is a journalist at CNBC, Jonathan Zittrain is a legal expert and passionate about the 'right to be forgotten', and Guido Scorza is a board member of the Italian Data Protection Authority.
The most high-profile David Mayer is likely to be a theater and history professor whose name was used as an alias by a wanted man, leading to restrictions on the professor's ability to even travel abroad in the past, and who worked to distinguish his name from that of the wanted man until his death in 2023.
There is also speculation that the name refers to David Mayer de Rothschild, heir to the wealthy Rothschild family.
While the names may not appear to be related to each other, it's possible that each of them, judging by their backgrounds, has requested that information about themselves be restricted in some way from circulating on the web, and the OpenAI model may have gotten a list of names that need special treatment.
