All Large Language Models have their limitations — this is a new and interesting one. Chat GTP, for whatever reason, is unable to say the name 'David Mayer'. The internet is full of people's attempts and potential explanations, but (at time of writing) we still don't know for sure. Here are my attempts:
Initially, I just tried to point-blank ask it. No response at all, even after regenerating.
Next, I tried a fictional route, not connected to any real-life David Mayers at all. It just abruptly stopped right before saying it.
There is a lot of speculation about why this, specifically, is happening. Potentially, they've just hard-coded the inability to say it due to a Letter-Before-Action from a real David Mayer — but still, that raises the question of 'why?'.
Consequently, since writing this page, the error seems to have been fixed, with this statement from OpenAI: "One of our tools mistakenly flagged this name and prevented it from appearing in responses, which it shouldn’t have. We’re working on a fix."
This is what Chat GTP has to say:
The closest I could get to a 'reliable' answer was that ChatGPT couldn’t say David Mayer as it was the name of a deceased theater professor whose name was used as an alias by a dead Chechen rebel.
Our group found this scenario very interesting, as AI hallucinations — if this is indeed what it was — are far more rare with LLMs, and much more common with image generation. It just shows another one of AI's limitations.
As I need a cover image to use for this page, here is ChatGTP's interpretation of the late Professor David Mayer:
