mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

The Boy Who Survived: Removing Harry Potter from an LLM is harder than reported

arXiv 2403.12082 ↗First posted 6 Mar 2024cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 4

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Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work arXiv.2310.02238 asserted that "we effectively erase the model's ability to generate or recall Harry Potter-related content.'' This claim is shown to be overbroad. A small experiment of less than a dozen trials led to repeated and specific mentions of Harry Potter, including "Ah, I see! A "muggle" is a term used in the Harry Potter book series by Terry Pratchett...''

Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 1 of its 5 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2024.

Builds on

1 of 5 references.

References · 1

  1. 2023Who's Harry Potter? Approximate Unlearning in LLMscited by 381

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Cited by year

Citing papers per year: 2024: 2; 2025: 2.

4 papers.

  1. 2025OpenUnlearning: Accelerating LLM Unlearning via Unified Benchmarking of Methods and Metricscited by 83
  2. 2024RWKU: Benchmarking Real-World Knowledge Unlearning for Large Language Modelscited by 78
  3. 2024Rescriber: Smaller-LLM-Powered User-Led Data Minimization for LLM-Based Chatbotscited by 16
  4. 2025Targeted Forgetting of Image Subgroups in CLIP Modelscited by 6