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According to an investigation by 404Media, OpenAI employs hundreds of contract workers to review real ChatGPT user conversations to improve the quality of the model's responses. Leaked internal documents and sources indicate that reviewers rate ChatGPT's responses on a scale from 1 to 7, focusing on helping reduce issues such as excessive flattery and over-animality.
Some commentators believe users are unaware that their chat records may be read by real people; even anonymized conversations may still contain sensitive personal information. Although OpenAI has deployed privacy filters, it has also admitted that they may sometimes make mistakes.
According to reports, these contract workers were recruited by Crossing Hurdles and paid by the AI training company Mercor. A North American commentator said their hourly wage exceeded $50. OpenAI currently has the "Improve the model for everyone" setting enabled by default. Users can turn off this option to prevent new chat records from being used for model training and related human reviews; the temporary chat mode does not use input data for model training.
It is worth noting that OpenAI has not recently disclosed its human review mechanism. Its FAQ has at least since 2023 stated that authorized personnel and service providers may view user data to improve model performance and advised users not to enter sensitive information. 404Media believes this disclosure is somewhat obscure, and users may find it difficult to intuitively understand the actual scope of human reviews.
Human feedback has become an important part of optimizing large models. Anthropic has also confirmed that it will conduct human reviews of Claude conversations with relevant privacy settings enabled and anonymize them before reviewing; Google also allows human reviewers to check some Gemini chat records. This incident once again highlights the balance between AI model training efficiency and user data privacy.