ChatGPT Won’t Say His Name

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a newsletter in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age.

Why does ChatGPT refuse to say the name Jonathan Zittrain? Anytime the bot should write those words, it simply shuts down instead, offering a blunt error message: “I’m unable to produce a response.” This has been a mystery for at least a year, and now we’re closer to some answers.

Writing for The Atlantic this week, Zittrain, a Harvard professor...