OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users’ prompts and other data to help improve the chatbot’s responses. The idea is that the contractors provide an, obviously, human touch to OpenAI’s models. Well, not all of the contractors are doing that. 404 Media has found multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI’s models have been fired for using AI to train the AI. That’s not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI’s whole thing is to make people use AI at work.
Some AI models already exhibit signs of
“model collapse,”
which is where AI models further trained on AI-generated text can become worse and worse. In this case, some of the people hired to partially stop that happening are themselves using AI-generated responses to train OpenAI’s models.
One contractor said they see people using AI “all the time and people are let go for it all the time, it’s pretty much the one thing that will get you kicked off ASAP.” The person said, “in a group of thousands there are tons that have been caught.” 
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Do you work as a prompt reviewer for OpenAI, Anthropic, or another AI company? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
Last week,
404 Media revealed
Project Lily, in which OpenAI has hundreds of contractors reading real ChatGPT users’ prompts and conversations which can include personal information. Those contractors then rate and critique the responses ChatGPT generated, including making sure that the responses are not too sycophantic or anthropomorphize ChatGPT. That reporting was based on internal documents and conversations with a person who works on the prompts. 
404 Media has now obtained other internal documents and spoken to three contractors doing work for OpenAI across various projects. Those projects can include more tha

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