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.
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.
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looking at inference prompts against their explicit promises, or maybe just because somebody tipped them off about his unpublished work?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").
I think that most of industry has understood the risks that OpenAI poses to everything. Their name is a broken promise, right out there in the open.
I had to leave Claude because Claude lost the ability to communicate, but I've gone to open weights models now. I trust some random fly-by-night backend from OpenRouter far more than I trust OpenAI.
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
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?
Lol, "Outrageous that the company that chose to ignore copyright holder claims, chose to ignore my checkbox of intent despite the implied pinky promise".
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!
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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"
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.
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 had to leave Claude because Claude lost the ability to communicate, but I've gone to open weights models now. I trust some random fly-by-night backend from OpenRouter far more than I trust OpenAI.
(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?
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.
https://privacy.openai.com/policies?modal=take-control
https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097746417012166816
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
So it may or may not happen regularly, but I would not over-index on a sample size of one.
I wonder if the default setting changed for newer accounts.
presumably its default behavior will vary depending on your user subscription or if your account belongs to an organization (Business, Enterprise, Edu?).
They are a deeply unethical company by any measure of observation.
https://privacy.openai.com/policies/en/?modal=take-control
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
I went ahead and uninstalled the app. Won't be renewing.