By now you may be wondering about the "allow us to use your chats to improve our product" (paraphrased) setting present in most consumer-facing chat bots. That setting is turned on by default in every bot we can think of, even with many paid plans. In ChatGPT's case, it does default to off in Enterprise, Business, and Educational customers.
That toggle switch does not work retroactively, though, so any chats already in ChatGPT's database will remain there unless the user requests deletion. Also, said deletion is also not retroactive, meaning that deleted chats may have already been hoovered and anonymized, and possibly reside in a dataset somewhere.
Although OpenAI initially had no answer to 404 Media's inquiry on whether users were explicitly informed that their chats could be read by humans, the company eventually offered a link to one of its FAQ pages that discusses human review for the purpose of model improvement. We verified ourselves that said notice is at least two years old, and likely older. After the publication of the exposé, the firm changed its help page explaining how people can opt out of data collection, but there's no mention of human operators in that text.
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Bruno Ferreira Social Links Navigation Contributor Bruno Ferreira is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware. He has decades of experience with PC hardware and assorted sundries, alongside a career as a developer. He's obsessed with detail and has a tendency to ramble on the topics he loves. When not doing that, he's usually playing games, or at live music shows and festivals.
alrighty_then If you work in software development you expect this, sort of a no-brainer that you'd analyze weak points to improve them and – at this point – that would mean a human reading the messages. Reply
Rand0m_Guy LOL, we were just using chatGPT to discuss an election. An incumbent is not rerunning this year, chatGPT said they are "term limited", they are not term limited, there is no limit for the position in question. We literally spend the next 30mins, 2 of us, trying to get chatGPT to tell us the truth and it couldnt, every prompt was something about Reply
Myrist It's Project Lily, not Lilly. Reply
Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-transcripts-are-reportedly-read-by-humans-to-improve-responses-including-those-with-personal-information-project-lilly-has-seen-openai-hire-hundreds-of-contractors-to-manually-review-logs#main
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