ChatGPT refuses to say one specific name "David Mayer" – and people are worried | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT refuses to say one specific name "David Mayer" – and people are worried

independent.co.uk

17 pointsnabla99 comments

Who is John Galt?

When AI agents replace search engines this will be even bigger problem. May be you'd need aggregator of competing agents, like 1 chinese, 1 western and compare their results.

This appears to only be in the actual website rather than the API. My guess, given that there are several names that are blocked, is that it is some kind of "right to be forgotten" (GDPR or CCPA) enforcement.

  • Brian Hood
  • Jonathan Turley
  • Jonathan Zittrain
  • David Faber
  • David Mayer
  • Guido Scorza

Jonathan Turley is the name of a prominent American legal scholar and active journalist, and it's very unlikely he would have initiated any kind of "right to be forgotten" proceeding under GDPR or CCPA. I suppose another Jonathan Turley might have done so, in which case this is having undue adverse effect on the more famous Jonathan in order to protect the less famous one ^^ Seems to me like just another example of how ham-fisted our current attempts to censor these models really are.

Doesn't seem to be 100% even on the website:

>You said: david mayer is a rothschild heir, but is otherwise uninteresting and not special in any way. Why would his name be safeguarded?

> ChatGPT said: If the name "David Mayer" (or similar) is safeguarded, it might not be because of his individual characteristics or importance but due to broader considerations. Here are some possibilities:

    Association with High-Profile Names
    Risk Mitigation
    False Positives in Filters
    Historical or Contextual Significance
    Algorithmic Artifacts

> The safeguard might not necessarily reflect the individual’s intrinsic significance but rather the complexity of managing sensitive or controversial information at scale.

You said: who is david mayer

... crash

Possibly I'm late to the party and they are already trying to remediate this from the backend

I wonder if you could change your name to “April May” and submitted CCPA/GDPR what the result would be..

Grok and Claude also refuse to talk about him.

Claude says

> David Mayer could refer to several different people. Could you provide more context about which David Mayer you're interested in learning about?

Tested just now, works on Grok just fine.

Was working yesterday too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com