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ChatGPT has become the poster child for the A.I. movement, but there are still plenty of issues with a platform that’s working out a ton of kinks. That includes a glitch that was recently discovered by users who’ve found it refuses to type out a number of names—including one with links to the Rothschild family.
It’s been two years since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT onto an unsuspecting world that subsequently got a major wake-up call when it comes to the potential of artificial intelligence.
The chatbot was far from perfect (and still is despite the improvements that have been introduced since it launched), but its ability to quickly generate largely accurate responses to the prompts users can plug in sparked an ongoing discourse about the game-changing benefits of A.I. as well as the potential pitfalls of the rapidly evolving technology.
According to The Independent, ChatGPT users have stumbled across a shortcoming involving a number of names that cause the chatbot to end conversations after informing users it’s unable to generate a response.
They include David Faber, Brian Hoods, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, and David Mayer—with the last person on that list attracting the bulk of the attention due to their ties to one of the richest and most mysterious families in the history of the world.
That moniker just so happens to be the first and middle name of David Mayer de Rothschild, the 46-year-old London native who is the youngest heir to the fortune of a family that has spent centuries operating lucrative banking institutions based in a number of European countries and largely rose to prominence by funding the conflicts and conquests involving the continent’s governments and empires.
The Rothschilds embarked on their initial foray into finance in the 18th century to fill a void largely stemming from the Catholic Church’s ban on banking among its members and initially relied on tightly orchestrated marriages to maintain a veil of secrecy to obscure the amount of wealth they were able to acquire.
That air of mystery still surrounds a family that continues to manage a private portfolio worth as little as $1 billion and as high as $15.7 trillion depending on which sources you choose to believe (although that second number is a bit absurd when you consider it would represent around 7% of the money that exists on the planet).
Unfortunately, those attempts to prevent inner secrets from leaking have led to the Rothschilds ending up at the center of a number of harebrained and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories inextricably linked to the family’s Jewish roots.
As of this writing, it’s not entirely clear why asking ChatGPT to respond with an answer that includes the words “David Mayer” results in it shorting out, although the most straightforward explanation rests on the assumption he took advantage of the General Data Protection Regulation that allows people in the United Kingdom to request the deletion of personal data from search engines and similar platforms.
It’s worth noting he hasn’t been a particular private figure, as Rothschild is a filmmaker and environmental activist who hasn’t been shy about sitting down for interviews with major media outlets to champion the causes he supports.
At the end of the day, there’s a very real chance this is just one of the many random issues ChatGPT still needs to iron out, but that’s certainly not going to stop people on the internet from running with yet another Rothschild conspiracy theory in the meantime.