Incident 855: Names Linked to Defamation Lawsuits Reportedly Spur Filtering Errors in ChatGPT's Name Recognition

Description: ChatGPT has reportedly been experiencing errors and service disruptions caused by hard-coded filters designed to prevent it from producing potentially harmful or defamatory content about certain individuals by blocking prompts containing specific names, likely related to post-training interventions. The reported names are Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber, David Mayer, and Guido Scorza.

Editor Notes: For the reference to Jonathan Turley, see Incident 506; for Brian Hood, see Incident 507. This incident also presents potential adversarial vulnerabilities, as well as unintended consequences for users sharing affected names.

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Entities

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Alleged: OpenAI and ChatGPT developed an AI system deployed by OpenAI and ChatGPT users, which harmed ChatGPT users , Jonathan Zittrain , Jonathan Turley , Guido Scorza , David Mayer , David Faber and Brian Hood.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

855

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-11-30

Editors

Applied Taxonomies

MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified

Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

7.3. Lack of capability or robustness

Risk Domain

AI system safety, failures, and limitations

Entity

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Unintentional

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Certain names make ChatGPT grind to a halt, and we know why

arstechnica.com

Why Wouldn’t ChatGPT Say This Dead Professor’s Name?

nytimes.com

The Mystery of Why ChatGPT Couldn’t Say the Name ‘David Mayer’

wsj.com

arstechnica.com · 2024

OpenAI's ChatGPT is more than just an AI language model with a fancy interface. It's a system consisting of a stack of AI models and content filters that make sure its outputs don't embarrass OpenAI or get the company into legal trouble whe…

nytimes.com · 2024

Across the final years of his life, David Mayer, a theater professor living in Manchester, England, faced the cascading consequences of an unfortunate coincidence: A dead Chechen rebel on a terror watch list had once used Mr. Mayer's name a…

wsj.com · 2024

David Mayer wasn't a particularly well-known name until last week, when it was propelled into the internet spotlight. The reason wasn't anything a person named David Mayer said or did, but rather the way the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT tr…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.