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.

> 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

IDK about “terrible,” but:

– 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).

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

Happened to me recently, but on Claude.

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”.

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!

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]”

These companies need to burn.

> Ignoring the checkbox is an utterly offensive move, but repeatedly manipulating it contrary to stated consumer intent is a whole other level.

I’m not sure why the second one is worse than the first one.

What makes you think the company that pirated a big portion of all copyrighted work will care about this checkbox?

At best they’ll “anonymize” the data before adding it to the corpus.

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.

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.

Does OpenAI use optimistic UI updates?
After you disabled the checkbox, it might have had failed in the backend (and not updated the UI).

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

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.

Horrible.

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 disabled it once, it has always stayed disabled.

So it may or may not happen regularly, but I would not over-index on a sample size of one.

> Make sure you check this thing to see if it hasn’t been re-enabled if you believe it to be off right now.

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.

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.

Bedrock is an option. Multiple platforms with solid data sovereignty.

If you don’t want them slurping your data, you’re gonna have to pay more.

Same as it ever 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” and YouTube case in point:

– 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.

Can confirm. I turned off mine last week when I started using it again for Astra. Checked this morning and voila, it was on.

I went ahead and uninstalled the app. Won’t be renewing.

Odd how much data people are trusting with a company on a monetary cliff edge.

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.

That’s because OpenAI has several “do not train on my data” controls, and you may be using only one.

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?