Interest for David Mayer and ChatGPT has gone so viral that the chatbot now provides a response instead of an error message.
What's more, ChatGPT's response now references the virality of the issue in a strange Streisand Effect and ouroboros hybrid phenomenon of the generative AI era. Prompting ChatGPT with "David Mayer" now generates a web search result saying, "Recently, users have reported that ChatGPT encounters issues when processing the name 'David Mayer,' leading to error messages or the chatbot being unable to generate a response. This anomaly has sparked curiosity and speculation online."
The response goes on to list well-known people with "David Mayer" in their name, starting with banking heir David Mayer de Rothschild, then American politician David R. Mayer, and finally the late British historian David Mayer who was famously mistaken for a Chechen terrorist and blacklisted.
In the most meta part of the response, ChatGPT concludes, "The exact cause of ChatGPT's difficulty with the name 'David Mayer' remains unclear, leading to various theories and discussions among users," citing Mashable's story, which first reported the issue, as the reason why the mystery is yet unsolved.
Soon after the David Mayer error was discovered, users found other names that prompt the same error: Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber, and Guido Scorza. As 404 Media pointed out, Turley and Zittrain are both law professors who have written about ChatGPT, with Turley claiming he was "defamed by ChatGPT." In a 2023 blog post, Turley said ChatGPT hallucinated "a claim of sexual harassment that was never made against me on a trip that never occurred while I was on a faculty where I never taught."
Hood, who is an Australian regional mayor sued OpenAI for defamation in 2023 when he discovered ChatGPT wrongly claimed he was imprisoned for bribery. Scorza is an attorney and member of the Italian Data Protection Authority who helped to temporarily ban ChatGPT in Italy until certain privacy measures were put in place.
Notably, when all of those names are prompted, ChatGPT still produces an error response. This suggests there's a legal reason for ChatGPT stonewalling users asking about certain people. But it also seems reasonable to assume OpenAI quickly patched the issue with searches for the name David Mayer, and this is the result.
Mashable has reached out to OpenAI again for clarification and will update this story with a response.
