ChatGPT users have found a way to confuse the bot

Internet users became interested in a strange bug in the operation of the popular ChatGPT chatbot from OpenAI. The fact is that if you ask him to give information about who David Mayer is or simply write this name, then the bot malfunctions and it reports that it cannot execute the command.

Image source: OpenAI

«I can’t answer,” ChatGPT writes when asked to write David Mayer’s name. This bug triggered a wave of search queries trying to find out information about this person, as well as to find out the possibility that ChatGPT is programmed to self-censor. The bug looks even more strange if you consider that the crash occurs when the combination “David Mayer” is mentioned in English, but at the same time the bot can give information if it is written about “Dave Mayer”.

According to the source, the ChatGPT bug has existed for at least several months. Back in June of this year, one of the chatbot users discovered that a request to write the name of CNBC journalist David Faber resulted in a similar error and ChatGPT reported that it could not respond to the request.

Image source: ChatGPT

Since then, enthusiasts on Reddit have identified six names that cause ChatGPT to crash. Among them were Brian Hood and Jonathan Turley, who had previously discovered that a chatbot was making up facts about their names, which could potentially harm their reputations. ChatGPT also cannot correctly handle the name of Guido Scorza, who is an employee of the Italian industry regulator and the author of a publication about how chatbot users can ask OpenAI to prohibit the creation of content using their personal data. The same list included Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor who warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence for humans.

It is possible that the failure of ChatGPT when certain names are mentioned is actually protecting the chatbot and OpenAI from libel suits that could potentially be filed by residents of the European Union, based on the legislation in force in the region. As for David Mayer, this man remains a mystery. One of the most famous people with this name is David Mayer de Rothschild, heir to the Rothschild family fortune, but nothing is known about his connections to the field of AI.