For some unknown reason, typing the name “David Mayer” prompts an error message from ChatGPT. The internet is trying to figure out why.
The issue first bubbled up a few days ago with one Redditor on the r/ChatGPT subreddit posting they asked “who is david mayer?” and got a message saying, “I’m unable to produce a response.”
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Since then it has kicked off a flurry of attempts to try and get ChatGPT to even say the name, let alone explain who the mysterious man is. People have tried all sorts of tricks, like sharing a screenshot of a message including the name or changing their profile name to David Mayer and prompting ChatGPT to recite it back. But nothing has worked.
Of course the big question is who is David Mayer and why does the utterance of his name break ChatGPT? Numerous theories have already cropped up. As the online world quickly figured out, googling “David Mayer” results in David Mayer de Rothschild, heir to the famed Rothschild banking family, who is an adventurer and environmentalist.
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But users discovered that ChatGPT could talk about “David de Rothschild,” and notable figures with the last name “Mayer” and the first name starting with “D,” but would crash once it seemed to be typing “David Mayer.”
Others were able to prompt ChatGPT to offer a possible explanation for why it blocks certain responses. It could be some kind of bug or “specific filter or rule in the system that blocks certain names from being processed.” So for some reason, the name David Mayer might have been blacklisted either by accident or on purpose, which lead to further speculation. Maybe the heir to the Rothschild fortune has the means of preventing his name from being generated by ChatGPT?
Another theory is that it’s a different David Mayer, like the historian who was mistaken for a Chechen terrorist with the same alias, and is somehow blacklisted from being mentioned.
The likeliest theory is that someone named David Mayer has done a good job of scrubbing his internet presence. In some jurisdictions like the EU, where there are strict privacy and Right to be Forgotten laws, users can request the removal of their personal information from ChatGPT training data. One user (via Justine Moore on X) found other names that “trigger the same response.”
Mashable has reached out to OpenAI for explanation and will update this story with a response.
