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Why does the name ‘David Mayer’ crash ChatGPT? Digital privacy requests may be at fault


Users of the conversational AI platform ChatGPT discovered an interesting phenomenon over the weekend: the popular chatbot refuses to answer questions if

But a potential thread of connection was soon discovered: these people were public or semi-public figures who may have preferred to have certain information “forgotten” by search engines or AI models. But these post-prompt handling rules are seldom made public, except in policy announcements like “the model will not predict election results for any candidate for office.” What likely happened is that one of these lists, which are almost certainly actively maintained or automatically updated, was somehow corrupted with faulty code that, when called, caused the chat agent to immediately break.

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