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People were puzzled when they realized that ChatGPT was avoiding mentioning the name of a deceased professor, "David Mayer." This raised concerns about privacy and artificial intelligence, but there were not many clear explanations provided.
Written by Ali Watkins
During the last few years of his life, David Mayer, a theater professor residing in Manchester, England, experienced the repercussions of a strange coincidence. A deceased Chechen rebel, who was on a terror watch list, had previously used Mr. Mayer’s name as an alias.
According to his family, the actual Mr. Mayer experienced disruptions to his travel plans, had his financial transactions halted, and was unable to receive important academic messages. These challenges continued to bother him until he passed away in 2023 at the age of 94.
However, his struggle for his identity gained attention again this month when observant users noticed that a certain name was causing OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot to shut down.
David Mayer.
Users tried to get the bot to say "David Mayer" in different ways, but instead they received error messages or the bot did not respond. It is not known why the bot had trouble with that specific name, and OpenAI did not provide any information on whether the issue was related to ChatGPT’s problem with the name.
The situation brings up challenging questions about artificial intelligence that can create content and the chatbots that use it: What caused the chatbot to malfunction when given that name? Who or what is in charge of making these decisions? And who should be held accountable for any errors that occur?
Catherine, the daughter of Mr. Mayer, mentioned in an interview that her father would have found some satisfaction in the situation as it would have shown the hard work he put into handling it.
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