This comes after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hinted at new AI systems that “learn about users throughout your life” to become “extremely useful and personalised”.
Some ChatGPT users noticed a strange and, for many, unpleasant thing: OpenAI’s chatbot suddenly started using specific names, even though no one asked it to do so.
One of the programmers shared in social network X (former Twitter) screenshots, which were first stumbled upon by the foreign edition of TechCrunch. There you can see how ChatGPT in the process of solving a mathematical problem suddenly involved his real name. the programmer himself called it “terrible and completely useless”.
Another user reacted even more sharply: “insanely creepy,” he wrote, “feels like peeking at a passport.”
It seems that this weirdness doesn’t apply to everyone, but only to certain versions of GPT like OpenAI o3. They were specially taught to “think longer” and show their “chain of reasoning” when giving an answer. And in the “chain of reasoning” names do appear, although the bot does not include them in the text of the final answer.
OpenAI itself has not yet commented on this information. But TechCrunch noted that the complaints started shortly after OpenAI recently rolled out a new update. It allows the chatbot to analyse a user’s previous correspondence to improve the quality of responses to new requests.
And while the fact that ChatGPT is suddenly calling you by name may seem odd, to say the least, it generally fits in with the recent negative news surrounding the use of large language models (LLMs) lately. One may recall, for example, the Google Gemini story where, in the course of a conversation with a graduate student, he advised him to “Please go away” and called him a “spot on the universe” in response to a routine question on gerontology (the science of aging). And startup Character.
AI has come under accusations that its chatbot may have played no small part in the suicide of a 14-year-old boy in Florida. So name-calling may not be the biggest problem, but it’s a red flag.