Put aside conspiracy theories: it became known why the name of the Rothschild heir «breaks» ChatGPT

Recently, ChatGPT users have noticed odd behavior from the chatbot—it temporarily “hung” when mentioning some well-known names.

OpenAI has not yet commented on the situation, but journalists from TechCrunch conducted their own investigation and found one of the obvious reasons why ChatGPT might block the names of some famous people—in particular, the name of the Rothschild dynasty heir, British ecologist, and philanthropist David Mayer.

Journalists discovered that all names that caused ChatGPT to “freeze” were somehow connected to the so-called “right to be forgotten”Right to be forgotten—a person's right under certain conditions to demand the removal of their personal data from public access via search engines, i.e., links to that data, which, in their opinion, might cause them harm., meaning these individuals had issues with false information about themselves on the Internet and had requested its removal.

For example, David Mayer’s name was often confused with the pseudonym of a criminal, and Bryan Hood is an Australian mayor who previously complained that a chatbot falsely accused him of a crime.

Similarly, ChatGPT froze from names like CNBC’s veteran reporter David Faber and Fox News commentator and lawyer Jonathan Turley, who last year experienced swatting (a type of prank involving false calls to law enforcement in the US); the list also includes legal expert Jonathan Zittrain, who has spoken extensively about the “right to be forgotten” and Guido Scorza, a specialist from the Italian Data Management Office.

TechCrunch speculates that ChatGPT had a certain list of people who required more careful processing for security and legal reasons, but the system malfunctioned and the model simply started freezing during requests. Meanwhile, there was no actual list of blocks—a theory heavily promoted by conspiracy theorists, which, in fact, OpenAI did not have.