---
title: "Deep Dive | “David Mayer” Crashes ChatGPT — Digital Privacy Requests Likely Behind It"
author: "Unique Research"
sourcePublication: "Unique Research (FFCAP English library)"
originalPublishedAt: "2024-12-03T11:25:16+08:00"
canonical: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20241203a03gmv00"
source: "https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20241203a03gmv00"
language: "en"
cnSourceUrl: "https://view.inews.qq.com/a/20241203A03GMV00"
---

# Deep Dive | “David Mayer” Crashes ChatGPT — Digital Privacy Requests Likely Behind It

_Unique Research · Deep Dive · December 3, 2024_

Over the weekend ChatGPT users found a quirk: mention “David Mayer” and the bot refuses; push harder and it goes silent or crashes. Conspiracy theories spread. A more ordinary explanation is likelier.

People tried to get ChatGPT to merely acknowledge the name — it failed mid-spelling every time. Then other crash names appeared: Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber, Guido Scorza — and more. OpenAI has not commented.

A pattern: many are public or semi-public figures who may want search engines or AI models to “forget” specific information about them.

**Brian Hood** — Australian mayor who said ChatGPT wrongly cast him as a decades-old criminal; lawyers contacted OpenAI without a suit; he told the _Sydney Morning Herald_ the false content was removed when GPT-4 replaced 3.5. **David Faber** — CNBC finance journalist. **Jonathan Turley** — lawyer/Fox commentator, once swatted via a fake police call. **Jonathan Zittrain** — legal scholar who discusses the “right to be forgotten.” **Guido Scorza** — Italian DPA board member who filed an OpenAI personal-data deletion request last year.

For David Mayer: no obvious lawyer/mayor match, but a professor of theatre and history (late Victorian stage ↔ early film) died summer 2023 at 94. In his last years legal and online trouble stemmed from sharing a name — used as an alias — with a wanted fugitive, blocking travel. He worked to disentangle his name while still teaching.

Hypothesis: OpenAI maintains special-handling lists for legal, safety, or privacy reasons — similar to election-candidate response rules. Post-prompt filters are rarely public except in policy lines (“won’t predict election outcomes”). One plausible failure mode: a maintained or auto-updated list broken by bad code/instructions — calling it crashes the reply. Speculation only — but not the first time post-training guidance made models behave oddly. (As of writing, “David Mayer” had started working again; other names still crashed.)

Occam’s razor applies: prefer the simplest explanation. Reminder: AI models aren’t magic — powerful autocomplete that can still be monitored and interfered with.

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Editorial English edition published on UniqueCapital: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20241203a03gmv00
On-site reading page: https://ffcap.cn/en/research/20241203a03gmv00