A bizarre saga in which users noticed the chatbot refused to say “David Mayer” raised questions about privacy and A.I., with few clear answers.
Across the final years of his life, David Mayer, a theater professor living in Manchester, England, faced the cascading consequences an unfortunate coincidence: A dead Chechen rebel on a terror watch list had once used Mr. Mayer’s name as an alias.
The real Mr. Mayer had travel plans thwarted, financial transactions frozen and crucial academic correspondence blocked, his family said. The frustrations plagued him until his death in 2023, at age 94.
But this month, his fight for his identity edged back into the spotlight when eagle-eyed users noticed one particular name was sending OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot into shutdown.
David Mayer.
Users’ efforts to prompt the bot to say “David Mayer” in a variety of ways were instead resulting in error messages, or the bot would simply refuse to respond. It’s unclear why the name was kryptonite for the bot service, and OpenAI would not say whether the professor’s plight was related to ChatGPT’s issue with the name.
But the saga underscores some of the prickliest questions about generative A.I. and the chatbots it powers: Why did that name knock the chatbot out? Who, or what, is making those decisions? And who is responsible for the mistakes?
“This was something that he would’ve almost enjoyed, because it would have vindicated the effort he put in to trying to deal with it,” Mr. Mayer’s daughter, Catherine, said of the debacle in an interview.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
