But who are you going to believe? Multiple independent academic researchers or the CEO who was fired two years ago for gross dishonesty?

Here's the original Mastodon post:

https://mathstodon.xyz/@andreasthom/117240535270608201

the fix is boring and known: BIG-bench shipped a canary GUID for exactly this, and you publish your decontam n-gram threshold (gpt-3 used 13-grams). no threshold disclosed, no claim.

I pay for the Pro ChatGPT plan, and if you go to settings > data controls this is the first setting:

> Improve the model for everyone

> Allow your content to be used to train our models, which makes ChatGPT better for you and everyone who uses it. We take steps to protect your privacy. Learn more.

It's on by default. We can debate whether or not it should be opt in or opt out, but no one should be surprised by this.

Under current understanding of the law, anything produced purely by LLMs (with no substantive human input, which is what OpenAI claimed in their post) is firmly in the public domain. So OpenAI can "claim" anything they want, it doesn't make it reality. In fact if I were the original authors I would just take their 400k lines of lean proof and relicense it under their own names/terms.

Reminder that there are degrees of "trained on conversations". From John Schulman:

> pretrain on user data, with users' tokens as prediction targets: high regurgitation risk, improper

> use user prompts to distill large models into small ones: low regurg. risk, some companies probably do this

> use user traces to construct RL tasks: low regurg. risk, because RL has low memorization abilities, but can extract customer IP, depending on how it's done. Ranges from benign "use explicit user feedback in reward model training" to invasive "upload user's coding environment and commit history to turn into rl envs"

source: https://x.com/johnschulman2/status/2097440545853637108

"Another researcher[/artist/writer/musician/programmer/doctor/director/etc] says OpenAI trained on conversations[/imagery/books/songs/code/classifications/videos/etc], then claimed breakthrou[gh/original art/bestselling books/chart-topping songs/unique applications/medical advice/free special effects/etc]"

Welcome to the party, with the rest of humanity.

Considering how Apple today announced that its products will contain a spying-on-conversation anti-feature by default, it seems reasonable to assume that all this spying is primarily done to train their AI model; and secondarily also to gather information about The People.

AI is becoming more evil by the day.

So people genuinely believe that toggling that "Improve the model for everyone" button makes their data safe from being used for training?

How do people become that trusting?

The phrasing itself is guilt tripping

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49638353

Original posts

https://mathstodon.xyz/@andreasthom/117240535270608201

https://mathstodon.xyz/@andreasthom/117240536885387540

https://mathstodon.xyz/@andreasthom/117240537520615623

This story is someone on bluesky screenshotting someone on twitter without a link. The person on twitter screenshotted the source on the fediverse without a link. This is getting daft.

There are so many naive academics. They still believe an "opt-out" button.

Navier Stokes was solved by an internal model, so good luck proving it wasn't trained on Buckmaster/Lepöge or other chats.

Academics don't get that AI is a dirty tech bro industry that stole IP via torrents and runs after every surveillance contract it can get.

I think the heart of this issue is: people assume they have anonymity in numbers, but we have the tools to make it easy to scoop your data if it's interesting to the company.

[delayed]

I think this is stupid, for three reasons:

1. The researches didn't actually have the breakthroughs. In the Navier-Stokes case they didn't solve the full problem, in this case too they didn't actually have the solution, they were experimenting with the methods.

2. Different OpenAI employees have come to out to say the only reason they can't definitively say no is that for privacy reasons they can't go see whether they actually did get any data out of a given user.

3. In any case, nobody at any point has suggested that opted-out user data was used for training. The author of the new tweet explicitly said they only opted out in late June, which is well after any RL on Sol would've ended (AFAICT OpenAI used 5.6 sol for those solutions)