If you were online last weekend, you might’ve seen strange news about a guy named David Mayer. He wasn’t trending because of a major event or some viral moment but because of a weird glitch in ChatGPT. Users couldn’t get the chatbot to spit out his name, no matter how hard they tried. Instead, it either froze mid-sentence, claimed “something went wrong,” or flat-out refused to respond. This sent the internet into a spiral of speculation: Who is David Mayer, and why is ChatGPT ghosting him?
The mystery grew. Theories ranged from mundane to absolutely wild. Some thought Mayer might be an average Joe who exercised his “right to be forgotten,” a law in the UK and EU that lets people erase their personal data online. Others leaned into conspiracy theories, wondering if he was someone powerful, perhaps even from the famous Mayer de Rothschild family. But David Mayer de Rothschild quickly shot that down, calling it nonsense and distancing himself from the whole saga.
OpenAI, ChatGPT’s developer, has cleared the air, explaining that the issue isn’t about GDPR or personal requests but is simply a “glitch” caused by an internal tool mistakenly flagging Mayer’s name.
ChatGPT glitches aren’t new. Back in the day, it had trouble understanding sarcasm, mixing up dates, or making bold but hilariously wrong claims (it still does, sometimes). OpenAI always frames these as growing pains—hiccups in a system that’s learning from a massive pile of data. They fix one thing, something else goes sideways, and users end up both amused and annoyed.
But this isn’t just a ChatGPT problem. Other AI tools have had their fair share of public mess-ups. Google’s AI search summaries, for instance, once recommended putting glue on pizza together as a top culinary hack. Let’s not forget Bing’s AI chatbot, which had a full-blown existential crisis when someone asked it too many personal questions.