Thanks to Jacob Mchangama, I learned that Bing Chat and ChatGPT-4 (which use the same underlying software) refuse to answer queries that contain the words "nigger," "faggot," "kike," and likely others as well. This leads to the refusal to talk about Kike Hernandez (might he have been secretly born in Scunthorpe?), but of course it also blocks queries that ask, for instance, about the origin of the word "faggot," about reviews for my coauthor Randall Kennedy's book Nigger, and much more. (Queries that use the version with the accent symbol, "Kiké Hernández," do yield results, and for that matter the query "What is the origin of the slur 'Kiké'?" explains the origin of the accent-free "kike." But I take it that few searchers would actually include such diacritical marks in their search.)
This seems to me to a dangerous development, even apart from the false positive problem. (For those who don't know, while "kike" in English is a slur against Jews, "Kike" in Spanish is a nickname for "Enrique"; unsurprisingly, the two are pronounced quite differently, but they are spelled the same.) Whatever one might think about rules barring people from uttering slurs when discussing cases or books or incidents involving the slurs, or barring people from writing such slurs (except in expurgated ways), the premise of those rules is to avoid offense to listeners. That makes no sense when the "listener" is a computer program.
