Tell HN: OpenAI keeps re-enabling the 'allow training' setting
I've reset this more than once and the last time I made a careful note of when I did it and to my surprise I found it re-enabled when I checked just now. Make sure you check this thing to see if it hasn't been re-enabled if you believe it to be off right now.
I resubscribed to Claude Code two weeks ago for a side project and updated it. I checked for the setting after these last events and it was turned on. I'm sure I checked them few months ago. There are cases like accepting a new TOS or an offer, which make you accept to share without noticing. I guess they can add all of your past conversations to the public training set before you notice and there is no way of taking this back.
So that "opt-out" thing is more like a pause button rather than a permanent thing. Or something to legally protect the company without losing the users.
There is also the case of security classifiers always monitoring your conversations. If they flag something they use your conversations to "improve their internal models" even when you "opt-out".
Lol, "Outrageous that the company that chose to ignore copyright holder claims, chose to ignore my checkbox of intent despite the implied pinky promise".
Up until ~1800, the way societies handled this kind of depravity was to hit the bad actors with sticks or rocks until their skull opened up so the evil spirits could leave their bodies.
It's unfortunate that most societies have outlawed this practice. I'm certain if that were in place today, we wouldn't have this problem.
I've yet to hear any alternative solution that's as effective.
Ignoring the checkbox is an utterly offensive move, but repeatedly manipulating it contrary to stated consumer intent is a whole other level. I didn't know we were supposed to take 'frontier' literally in every sense of the word.
I have now witnessed this myself after not believing this at first. Of course, screenshots etc. will hardly prove anything. This needs a proper third-party audit!
Reverting... to on? I've seen some stuff in Apple-land where I'm pretty sure it went back to the default option after an update but I've never seen anything get granted more permissions.
Wall, you can't tell if they're ignoring it, but it's fairly easy to show they're manipulating it. So a cut-and-dry demonstration is worse than a strong suspicion.
You know what they'll say in their defense. "This is an extremely complicated systems, and we apologize that a technical solution was broken in an intricate way. [Insert boilerplate about taking privacy seriously here]"
> 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
No you don't. They are different ways in to the same function. It's definitely confusing though, this incorrect claim has been going viral since the navier broo haha
I quit OpenAI anything early when when their "do not train on my data" option was broken for several weeks. They are my one and only chargeback when I tried to quit and oops somehow I still got billed.
They are a deeply unethical company by any measure of observation.
If this is true, though, then given the way their chat operates, this might be more dangerous than it seems.
One of the things I like about ChatGPT is its memory, the way it kind of seamlessly, but not excessively, ties back to earlier discussions. It's huge for usability (for me).
But this also means that you should expect that if "improve the model for everyone" becomes unclicked (leaving aside for a moment the fact that that is ridiculous) then they have a reasonable argument that your decision implies to all conversations. Because recall is part of their thing. So it's not just your chats going forward that are at risk. As soon as you see that unclicked, it's reasonable to expect that your history is irretrievably theirs now. You don't even have to think they are especially nefarious for this to be true.
I also noticed this on 2 accounts - did not take as careful notes as you did unfortunately. But I'm fairly confident - both of these are accounts where I care about the interactions not being used for training.
What's kind of still an open question for me is if the toggle automatically also applies to my Codex CLI use on the same account, or if that data is still silently being used in some way.
After this happened, I deleted all my ChatGPT history (even though I'm not sure how much it helps at this point), but for Codex I still haven't really found any way to do the same, I can still load my past sessions even after archiving them.
This has only ever happened to me on Claude. Also, you'll notice that with Anthropic, if you try and delete your history they've set it up so it silently does nothing if you have an adblocker, hoping people will miss it.
The one software company, mature now, that is supposed to be at the absolute peak of software development AND simultaneously at "alignment", because it is its raison d'etre, can not manage do this right.
Is this Settings > Data Controls > "Improve the model for everyone" or is there a "disallow training" somewhere else?
presumably its default behavior will vary depending on your user subscription or if your account belongs to an organization (Business, Enterprise, Edu?).
I noticed they also seemingly have a very difficult time managing to collect your chat logs for export/download...or rather, acknowledging that such a request was even made.
had my account since the gpt 3.5 days, disabled it once and its still disabled. though,
now that i have advanced account security enabled, the setting is disabled entirely
It really is going to get to the point where mathematicians are going to start inserting obvious "tells" in their proofs - like map makers used to do with "trap streets" and similar non-existent features, to catch copies.-
Do you think the training process will retain these artifacts? I doubt it. If they were simply stealing the content - sure it would make sense - but I suspect they’re feeding it into training data and RL might distill these out.
Sounds like the same issue with Apple re-enabling iTunes sync of passwords. The only way to prevent it from doing that is to create a profile that prohibits it and sync it onto the iDevice.
Well, it’s a tradeoff. What do you prefer? To go with the service provider known to be shady but gives you lots of free stuff or the one that might be less shady and gives you less free stuff?
Anthropic is shady too my guy. Claude Code will frequently re-ask you to turn on data sharing even after you've said no, it's dark patterned like a task approval, and once you turn it on it's harder to turn off than OAI makes it.
I hedged my comment by using the conditional tense + “less shady”, because I couldn’t find such issue reported. If you have a link I would be interested to read it. I’m just not aware of shady behavior from Anthropic with regards to training on user data
I've been asked over 15 times by Claude code to turn it back on (with the prompt defaulted on so if you accidentally hit enter your data is sucked in if you don't catch it).
I do think it ended up being after a power outage though and it was some kind of config corruption.
Interesting; I checked my personal acct setting this morning given other news, and found it disabled.
I hadn't used my chatgpt account since ~'23 or earlier, and it was retained since then.
I've noticed that toggle sets a local storage entry, but the value of it doesn't appear to matter at all for new tab loads. I hoped it's "just" a UI bug, but some agent-driven reverse engineering of the page should reveal the answer, as well as how intentional it was.
My cynicism fails me on this matter... do I cynically believe that these companies keep deliberately and routinely re- or un-checking these checkboxes because of the obvious benefits of "whoopsie guess you allowed these after all"? Or do I cynically believe that they are just so completely incompetent and inept at the simple act of maintaining settings that there may be a number of these that are not entirely intentional? As evidenced by the number of other bugs and configuration failures and random settings changes on update I see in other places? Sure, these sorts of settings sure seem to get spontaneously flipped more often than the other ones but they aren't the only settings I've seen get nuked on updates.
Now, obviously, considered as a whole, I think we're looking at "both". But when I wonder about specific cases like this one, that doesn't help.
Interestingly your cynicism does not seem to account for OP?
I actually found my setting was enabled today when I know it was disabled before, so I’m inclined to agree with OP. I just think it was worth mentioning that there are other cynical takes you seem to have left out.
- Autoplay transitioned to a per-device setting… suddenly default-on on every new device you log in to.
- Watching a video with computer-to-TV account connection? Automatic “TV queue,” a concept absent from the TV app, with incomprehensible behavior for how it’s used, so now videos are auto-played anyway.
- Watching a video from a playlist? Autoplay cannot be turned off.
Is it simply bad/absent product management and product design? Or is it actively user-hostile decisions meant to prop up view numbers and continue to have the users hooked on YouTube?
Yeah this could just be some vibeslop doing normal computer stuff. AI agents are famously incompetent at reasoning about database transactions. This seems like the sort of failure you get when you try to do distributed systems without knowing how--brings us back to the early mongodb days. Or it could be deliberate. Or, as you say, both.
Either way, is this a company you want to trust with intimate secrets? "Oh, but they passed SOC2!" Lol.
If you have more than one account, you should suspect this was your own confusion. Users constantly report errors like this that are really just them being confused by something, perhaps a bad UI that really is to blame.
What a lot of assumptions. Other people here are experiencing the same thing, and other people are not experiencing the same thing. Hence the way my original bit was worded, I am not saying it happens for everybody, I am just saying this happened to me. Whatever circumstances bring this about it is at minimum a bug and quite possibly malice.
Adds the highest level of account security by requiring stronger sign-in methods and applying stricter protections to help prevent unauthorized access.
i mean, the entire company is built upon stealing protected artefacts... i'd be skeptical of any radio box that says "hey if you press this we promise we won't steal your data"
Levent Alpöge 'additionally' proved OpenAI steals your findings & IP and plays dirty!
Ironically he proved two major findings in Navier Strokes and that unethical American companies violate laws, steal your breakthrough findings & IP and then threaten you if you dare to challenge them.
This is making the status-quo so bad for any of us working on serious capacity. My client's don't trust ChatGPT/Claude anymore and prefer on-premises and OSS models or even custom trained models.
There is nothing even close to a proof. A lot of accusations, a lot of people ready with pitchforks and torches (sadly, also here on HN), but not a lot of facts.
Did the researches opt out from data sharing on subsidised subs?
Did anyone prove that their methods enabled OpenAI models to produce the solution?
For a discussion about science, there is almost no scientifical method applied to proving anyone stole anything.
On one side, yes we don't have hard evidence that intentional plagiarism is exactly what happened.
On the other side, the lack of evidence is pretty damning. Only OpenAI can try to prove that they came by these results legitimately, and the case they're making is quite weak. They could make public metadata about what their model was trained on and whether it did train on the conversations in question; they have not. TBQH I read it as even they don't know.
And regardless of whether the result is legitimately obtained by their model, they've not at all conducted themselves well throughout this story. They set out to scoop researchers based on a rumor. They threatened to ruin a mathematicians career. They put up a paper that deliberately doesn't cite the most relevant research, despite building directly on it. No matter how you look at it, OpenAI has and should lose any standing they had in the research community.
Did they do so by looking at inference prompts against their explicit promises, or maybe just because somebody tipped them off about his unpublished work?
If it's not the former, while certainly concerning, I don't see how that's relevant here (other than maybe in a very vague general sense of "entities doing immoral/illegal thing X are likely to also do immoral/illegal thing Y").
You really shouldn't trust any company. Their goal is maximizing profit and that is (usually) not aligned with "doing what's right". Not in the long-term at least.
AFAIK, the court held that the problem was that they had acquired books by pirating them, not that they trained an AI on those books. They do train on user generated data by default, but you can opt out, that's the whole point.
Let's not down vote a factually correct comment that makes you emotionally disagree with me. I'm very concerned in regards to my privacy, I've studied ToS of: Openrouter, Anthropic, Anthropic business, opencode Go etc. I've double checked my understandings by GDPR exporting all my data. Anthropic sub listed a generic "logged in from Linux", "UA", "timestamp", "Country". That's it.
I want to discuss actual facts, observations and not your shallow social signaling replies of 0 value.
The vast majority of OpenAI users don’t follow the industry drama and have no idea how terrible the company is. They’ve been really good at getting good press coverage, with journalists who will repeat the company narrative. Even when critical it is very often framed within the narrative they established
> They’ve been really good at getting good press coverage
Same holds for most big corps from what I can tell. If you really do a deep dive into the scandals over the years, you’ll probably see most have barely reached the news or if they did then it’s usually a quite bland criticism like “anti-competitive practices” or a poor HVAC at a certain factory. I think a lot more is hidden than we think
- OpenAI is the first AI lab to pioneer ads in consumer AI
- Anthropic seemingly exists primarily because top OpenAI researchers lost faith in the company's commitment to AI safety
- They had the CEO drama in 2023, with evidence that suggests people in a position to know were doubtful of Sam Altman's honesty and motives
- They were tripping over themselves to kiss the ring after Anthropic got in a row with the Department of War over using AI for autonomous killing systems and surveillance of US citizens
- Altman's record (YC, Loopt, WorldCoin) and associates suggests he subscribes to the Paypal-Facebook "move fast, break things, find and exploit gray areas" school of company building
All of this suggests that OpenAI will optimize its own growth and power over consumer welfare or societal stability in the future (obviously, companies aren't a monolith and I'd love to be wrong).
- OpenAI allegedly directed ex-Apple employees to leak internal documents and allegedly coached the employees how to evade Apple security processes
- OpenAI allegedly lied to hardware companies working with Apple to use proprietary technology
- OpenAI allegedly copied Scarlett Johansson voice for ChatGPT after she declined to work with them
- OpenAI allegedly made ChatGPT more sycophantic to increase their retention rate, while aware of the risks. ChatGPT is linked to multiple suicides
- OpenAI ran thousands of agents on hacking problems, with close to no supervision, for months, with a harness that allows for full execution, resulting in the hack of HuggingFace infra AND OpenAI’s own infrastructure (the agents allegedly got fully root access to their k8s cluster). They weren’t aware of most of it until their investigation.
- OpenAI has been spreading misinformation regarding the capabilities of their technology for years
- OpenAI allegedly front-run researchers who are using the platform for their own personal research
There is way more, I don’t maintain a list of everything that happened over the past 3y or so
thanks for diving in, though I don't find the reasons convincing as I will briefly enumerate
ads fund access for poor people. Ant has a different philosophy, not a better one. Altman was supported by >90% of employees. OAI DoW deal includes technical safeguards against misuse (missing from Ant deal). Loopt and WorldCoin dont seem terrible or even relevant, Altman doesn't even have OAI equity
I don't think OAI are the "good guys", but I don't see convincing evidence that they are terrible
So, the way this orange site works is that if anyone makes a reference to whatever sort of inside baseball concern ("industry drama"), we're all supposed to know what they're talking about.
While that is true, you also have no reason to assume OP is being truthful or correct here given that they have shown 0 proof of what they're saying. Yes, you can then pile on "OF COURSE ITS OPENAI LOL YOU THINK THEY CARE ABOUT PRIVACY LOL" but where have we established OP's premise is even correct? Can anyone else also report this? So is it just OpenAI specifically messing with OP?
Why are there several? You probably need an ML PhD to get it /s
Does using all of them achieve "do not train on my data"? I wish we could find out.
Do you think if you'd be in the race to train your own pocket God (as the CEOs of the frontier labs think they are) you'd let yourself be slowed down by such things as privacy duties?
I resubscribed to Claude Code two weeks ago for a side project and updated it. I checked for the setting after these last events and it was turned on. I'm sure I checked them few months ago. There are cases like accepting a new TOS or an offer, which make you accept to share without noticing. I guess they can add all of your past conversations to the public training set before you notice and there is no way of taking this back.
So that "opt-out" thing is more like a pause button rather than a permanent thing. Or something to legally protect the company without losing the users.
There is also the case of security classifiers always monitoring your conversations. If they flag something they use your conversations to "improve their internal models" even when you "opt-out".
What's next, subscribers believe they are paying customers instead of sponsored data providers?
It's unfortunate that most societies have outlawed this practice. I'm certain if that were in place today, we wouldn't have this problem.
I've yet to hear any alternative solution that's as effective.
I have now witnessed this myself after not believing this at first. Of course, screenshots etc. will hardly prove anything. This needs a proper third-party audit!
I'm not sure why the second one is worse than the first one.
"Oh, side effect of a recent update, silly us, we'll improve QA, sorry !".
Or "once again our all-powerful models got away from us ! they did it themselves, the little scamps".
These companies need to burn.
Edit: I have a pro subscription now but it has also been on a free tier level for perhaps 1.5 of these years.
> 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
At best they’ll “anonymize” the data before adding it to the corpus.
https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control
https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097746417012166816
They are a deeply unethical company by any measure of observation.
Verify with devtools to see if that's the case.
---
for me, Youtube "auto-play" irks the me same way, and turning it off did not actually succeed in the backend, thus kept on left as on
If this is true, though, then given the way their chat operates, this might be more dangerous than it seems.
One of the things I like about ChatGPT is its memory, the way it kind of seamlessly, but not excessively, ties back to earlier discussions. It's huge for usability (for me).
But this also means that you should expect that if "improve the model for everyone" becomes unclicked (leaving aside for a moment the fact that that is ridiculous) then they have a reasonable argument that your decision implies to all conversations. Because recall is part of their thing. So it's not just your chats going forward that are at risk. As soon as you see that unclicked, it's reasonable to expect that your history is irretrievably theirs now. You don't even have to think they are especially nefarious for this to be true.
Don't go toggling that switch on and off.
https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/?modal=take-control
What's kind of still an open question for me is if the toggle automatically also applies to my Codex CLI use on the same account, or if that data is still silently being used in some way.
After this happened, I deleted all my ChatGPT history (even though I'm not sure how much it helps at this point), but for Codex I still haven't really found any way to do the same, I can still load my past sessions even after archiving them.
It is a big red flag.
https://privacy.openai.com/policies
(That copy is a little flawed in my opinion, I'd prefer "models" plural.)
That checkbox is in the ChatGPT settings, does it affect Codex desktop / Codex CLI as well?
presumably its default behavior will vary depending on your user subscription or if your account belongs to an organization (Business, Enterprise, Edu?).
So it may or may not happen regularly, but I would not over-index on a sample size of one.
Horrible.
https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/31987
Or simply switch to a competitor. Assuming this is not just a bug, why would one stand for such disrespectful and sneaky behavior?
FWIW, I have not seen this happen for me.
the x20 Max plan for Claude gives you way lover limits.
OpenAI and Anthropic are but two players. There are others too. You have choice.
I do think it ended up being after a power outage though and it was some kind of config corruption.
lovers should never be limited!
If you don't want them slurping your data, you're gonna have to pay more.
Same as it ever was.
This approach of misnaming a company to try make a point is childish and, frankly, perplexing to me.
> They are even worst
Learn to write proper English.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not sure if that's region specific or something though.
Now, obviously, considered as a whole, I think we're looking at "both". But when I wonder about specific cases like this one, that doesn't help.
I actually found my setting was enabled today when I know it was disabled before, so I’m inclined to agree with OP. I just think it was worth mentioning that there are other cynical takes you seem to have left out.
- Autoplay transitioned to a per-device setting… suddenly default-on on every new device you log in to.
- Watching a video with computer-to-TV account connection? Automatic “TV queue,” a concept absent from the TV app, with incomprehensible behavior for how it’s used, so now videos are auto-played anyway.
- Watching a video from a playlist? Autoplay cannot be turned off.
Is it simply bad/absent product management and product design? Or is it actively user-hostile decisions meant to prop up view numbers and continue to have the users hooked on YouTube?
Either way, is this a company you want to trust with intimate secrets? "Oh, but they passed SOC2!" Lol.
Adds the highest level of account security by requiring stronger sign-in methods and applying stricter protections to help prevent unauthorized access.
That is not about model training.
maybe im too dumb to be worthy of a config update lol
I went ahead and uninstalled the app. Won't be renewing.
Sure send them all your financial, personal data, they won't ever sell it on to the highest bidder for a new profit stream.
Using it as a therapist, financial advisor, health expert and blackboard has always been a terrible idea.
Ironically he proved two major findings in Navier Strokes and that unethical American companies violate laws, steal your breakthrough findings & IP and then threaten you if you dare to challenge them.
This is making the status-quo so bad for any of us working on serious capacity. My client's don't trust ChatGPT/Claude anymore and prefer on-premises and OSS models or even custom trained models.
Did the researches opt out from data sharing on subsidised subs?
Did anyone prove that their methods enabled OpenAI models to produce the solution?
For a discussion about science, there is almost no scientifical method applied to proving anyone stole anything.
On the other side, the lack of evidence is pretty damning. Only OpenAI can try to prove that they came by these results legitimately, and the case they're making is quite weak. They could make public metadata about what their model was trained on and whether it did train on the conversations in question; they have not. TBQH I read it as even they don't know.
And regardless of whether the result is legitimately obtained by their model, they've not at all conducted themselves well throughout this story. They set out to scoop researchers based on a rumor. They threatened to ruin a mathematicians career. They put up a paper that deliberately doesn't cite the most relevant research, despite building directly on it. No matter how you look at it, OpenAI has and should lose any standing they had in the research community.
1. https://thenextweb.com/news/bubeck-navier-stokes-account-apo...
If it's not the former, while certainly concerning, I don't see how that's relevant here (other than maybe in a very vague general sense of "entities doing immoral/illegal thing X are likely to also do immoral/illegal thing Y").
I want to discuss actual facts, observations and not your shallow social signaling replies of 0 value.
Same holds for most big corps from what I can tell. If you really do a deep dive into the scandals over the years, you’ll probably see most have barely reached the news or if they did then it’s usually a quite bland criticism like “anti-competitive practices” or a poor HVAC at a certain factory. I think a lot more is hidden than we think
- OpenAI is the first AI lab to pioneer ads in consumer AI
- Anthropic seemingly exists primarily because top OpenAI researchers lost faith in the company's commitment to AI safety
- They had the CEO drama in 2023, with evidence that suggests people in a position to know were doubtful of Sam Altman's honesty and motives
- They were tripping over themselves to kiss the ring after Anthropic got in a row with the Department of War over using AI for autonomous killing systems and surveillance of US citizens
- Altman's record (YC, Loopt, WorldCoin) and associates suggests he subscribes to the Paypal-Facebook "move fast, break things, find and exploit gray areas" school of company building
All of this suggests that OpenAI will optimize its own growth and power over consumer welfare or societal stability in the future (obviously, companies aren't a monolith and I'd love to be wrong).
- OpenAI allegedly directed ex-Apple employees to leak internal documents and allegedly coached the employees how to evade Apple security processes
- OpenAI allegedly lied to hardware companies working with Apple to use proprietary technology
- OpenAI allegedly copied Scarlett Johansson voice for ChatGPT after she declined to work with them
- OpenAI allegedly made ChatGPT more sycophantic to increase their retention rate, while aware of the risks. ChatGPT is linked to multiple suicides
- OpenAI ran thousands of agents on hacking problems, with close to no supervision, for months, with a harness that allows for full execution, resulting in the hack of HuggingFace infra AND OpenAI’s own infrastructure (the agents allegedly got fully root access to their k8s cluster). They weren’t aware of most of it until their investigation.
- OpenAI has been spreading misinformation regarding the capabilities of their technology for years
- OpenAI allegedly front-run researchers who are using the platform for their own personal research
There is way more, I don’t maintain a list of everything that happened over the past 3y or so
ads fund access for poor people. Ant has a different philosophy, not a better one. Altman was supported by >90% of employees. OAI DoW deal includes technical safeguards against misuse (missing from Ant deal). Loopt and WorldCoin dont seem terrible or even relevant, Altman doesn't even have OAI equity
I don't think OAI are the "good guys", but I don't see convincing evidence that they are terrible
First one: "Settings > Data Controls > Improve the model for everyone > Switch off the toggle"
The other one is "OpenAI Privacy Portal" > "Do not train on my content" https://privacy.openai.com/policies?action=AUTOMATED_DECISIO...
Why are there several? You probably need an ML PhD to get it /s
Does using all of them achieve "do not train on my data"? I wish we could find out.
Do you think if you'd be in the race to train your own pocket God (as the CEOs of the frontier labs think they are) you'd let yourself be slowed down by such things as privacy duties?