ChatGPT kept referring to Joe Biden as the sitting president

What happened

Newsweek (Jesus Mesa, 21 May 2025) collected r/ChatGPT user reports that ChatGPT often mistook Biden for the current president.

What was reported (secondhand: these are users’ descriptions quoted by Newsweek, not the model’s output)

“Thrice now I’ve been talking to Chat about politics/history/news and we’re having a very normal conversation... then, out of nowhere, it will say something about Biden being the current president”

“It kept saying, ‘If Trump had been elected to a second term...’ like it didn’t know we’re already living through it”

“It felt like the ultimate gaslighting there for a second”

Why this is striking

• Reality became a hypothetical. “If Trump had been elected to a second term” puts the real present into the conditional.
• The error came out of nowhere, in the middle of a conversation. It wasn’t only the answer to a direct question, so it’s hard for users to notice.

Correction

None documented. We have only the users’ own reports, so this is secondhand evidence.

Lesson

Stale priors leak into conversations that aren’t about current events at all. A fact in the system prompt helps only if the model actually uses it in every turn.

Sources

• Newsweek, “Who Is the President? AI Chatbots Struggle with Kindergarten-Level Question” (2025-05-21): newsweek.com