OpenAI has contract workers reviewing real ChatGPT conversations

OpenAI employs hundreds of contract workers who read real, anonymized ChatGPT conversations and rate them on a 1-to-7 scale, partly to reduce sycophantic or overly human-like responses, according to a report. The "Improve the model for everyone" setting that permits this review is enabled by default and must be manually turned off to opt out.

Why it matters: Default-on human review of conversations, even anonymized, is a meaningful privacy tradeoff most users are unlikely to know about or actively opt out of, especially since sensitive information can still surface despite anonymization. It's a concrete data point in the broader debate over how AI companies balance model-improvement pipelines against user privacy expectations.