As reported in an article in The Guardian, this weekend, Internet users discovered that certain names cause ChatGPT to bug. When people asked questions related to “David Mayer,” it caused the artificial intelligence to crash. In some cases, the AI has indicated that it is unable to produce a response. In others, it stops working after writing “David”.
Subsequently, according to TechCrunch, other names were discovered to cause bugs on ChatGPT, including Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber and Guido Scorza. Regarding the name David Mayer, OpenAI has already explained itself. In a statement relayed by The Guardian, it indicates: “One of our tools mistakenly flagged this name and prevented it from appearing in replies, which it shouldn’t have. We are working on a fix”. And as of this writing, the AI is able to respond to prompts that include that name. However, it continues to bug for other names, including “Brian Hood”. OpenAI may still be working on a resolution to this issue as of this writing.
In any case, the discovery of this problem has inspired quite a few theories. For example, some have thought that ChatGPT avoids talking about David Mayer de Rothschild. But, questioned by The Guardian, he indicated that he had nothing to do with this problem on ChatGPT. “No, I did not ask to have my name removed. I have never had contact with Chat GPT. Unfortunately, this is all driven by conspiracy theories”, he said.
For the moment, OpenAI has not given details on the origin of this bug. But many media believe that it is due to the application, by ChatGPT, of the European right to be forgotten (a right which allows, for example, to request dereferencing on Google). In essence, it is possible that the names that cause an AI bug are names of people who have exercised this right on ChatGPT. But for now, this is just a theory.
- This weekend, we discovered that ChatGPT can bug when including certain names in prompts
- While the problem has inspired numerous theories, OpenAI calls it a simple bug
- It is possible that this error is caused by the application of the Right to be forgotten
