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

To add to this, merely using the thumbs up/down button in a chat could share your entire conversation with them for model training.

From their docs[1] (archive copy is at [2]):

> You can opt out of training through our privacy portal by clicking on “do not train on my content.” To turn off training for your ChatGPT conversations and Codex tasks, follow the instructions in our Data Controls FAQ. Once you opt out, new conversations will not be used to train our models.

> For a linked teen account, a parent or guardian may manage whether conversations can be used to improve our models through Parental controls.

> Even if you have opted out of training, you can still choose to provide feedback to us about your interactions with our products (for instance, by selecting thumbs up or thumbs down on a model response). If you choose to provide feedback, the entire conversation associated with that feedback may be used to train our models.

[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20260910151242/https://help.open...

We are asking people to become experts in all domains rather than providing a safe context through regulations and laws. I don't like thinking the issue is people, I am a person myself, and I often do mistakes on things I don't want to be an expert at but I do believe I should be in a safe context and not have to worry about every single thing.

Or at least: tell me I should be careful/worry about those particular things.

Coincidentally, a tweet from OpenAI's Tibo yesterday:

https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2097746417012166816

Literally every famous open math problem has had >1 mathematicians ask ChatGPT to solve it. Probably greater than >1000 if you count randos. There is no math problem that OpenAI/Anthropic can solve that didn’t have users already try it in Chat/Claude.

Personally, I wouldn’t assume it was lying. To me, dark patterns (like manipulative wording) imply that:

1) someone in a governing body, or someone in the organization, e.g a designer, ethicist, lawyer, developer, etc. has successfully argued that users should be able to avoid something that they determine is not in their best interest.

And also:

2) someone in the c-suite or marketing has decided to mitigate that through some dark pattern.

If they never intended to give the user that control, they’d probably just not give the user the control in the first place. Giving them the option and not honoring it would either imply they were that incompetent or careless with fate protection, which seems most likely if this is all true, or an even more cynical approach to tricking users into thinking it’s not used for training to get them to share better shit. But if that was the case, why bother with the sleazy dark pattern? That seems a little cartoon villain-y to me. I suppose the in-between option would be that they decided at some point they were no longer willing to honor it and didn’t want to deal with the inevitable PR shitstorm of removing it. I could definitely see that happening in this industry, these days.

There's also the fact that the setting has been getting turned on by some users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643556