In the most meta part of the response, ChatGPT concludes, "The exact cause of ChatGPT's difficulty with the name 'David Mayer' remains unclear, leading to various theories and discussions among users," citing Mashable's story, which first reported the issue, as the reason why the mystery is yet unsolved.

Users of the conversational AI platform ChatGPT discovered an interesting phenomenon over the weekend: the popular chatbot refuses to answer questions if asked about a “David Mayer.” Asking it to do so causes it to freeze up instantly.

ChatGPT isn't new to glitches. From struggling with sarcasm to getting dates wrong, and making false claims, ChatGPT has done it all. OpenAI calls them growing pains—problems that occur as the system learns from a huge dataset.