The default name for a person is John Doe. Anglo Saxon names in general are extremely common across the internet for non-nefarious reasons. So the tokens that make up "John" have a ton of associations in a wide variety of contexts and if the model hallucinates there's no particularly negative direction you'd expect it to go.
But Mohammed doesn't show up as often in the internet, and while it's also for non-nefarious reasons, it results in there being significantly fewer associations in the training data. What would be background noise for in the training data for John ends up being massively distorted by the smaller sample size: even tendencies for people to make racist jokes about the name.
-
People have this weird idea that OpenAI and co are aligning these models according to some hidden agenda but the reality is minorities are a minority of the training data for very obvious reasons. So if you don't "censor" them, you're not making them more truthful, you're leaving them dumber for a lot of tasks.
There's censorship beyond that which feels very CYA happening, but I really hope people aren't clamoring to sticking models that aren't intelligent enough to realize the tokens for John vs Mohammed should not affect a summarization task into anything even tangentially important...