Hundreds of contractors are reportedly reading real ChatGPT conversations

OpenAI is paying hundreds of contractors to read real ChatGPT conversations and rate the chatbot’s replies under the internal codename Project Lily, and did not answer when asked where it had told users. The Court of Justice held last September that a controller’s duty to inform applies at collection and does not depend on whether the recipient can identify anyone.

OpenAI is paying hundreds of contractors to read real ChatGPT conversations and rate the chatbot’s replies, under the internal codename Project Lily, 404 Media reported.

The reviewers do not see usernames. They can see a user memories summary above the prompt, which sometimes shows what the person has used the chatbot for before and where in the world they may live.

OpenAI says a Privacy Filter model strips personal information first. Its own page for that model says it can make mistakes, miss uncommon identifiers and under-redact when context is limited.

404 Media asked the company to point to where it tells users that humans may read their chats. OpenAI did not answer, and after publication pointed to a help page.

Anthropic confirmed it uses human review too, for users who switch the setting on, and says it removes account identifiers first. Google’s Gemini carries a line saying humans review some saved chats.

Europe settled the part that matters here last September.

The Court of Justice held in EDPS v SRB that a controller’s duty to inform people applies before any transfer, and is judged from the controller’s own point of view rather than the recipient’s.

So whether a contractor in North America could work out who wrote a prompt is not the test. The obligation sat with OpenAI at the moment it collected the conversation.

Italy’s regulator has already fined the company EUR 15M, nine of it for processing without an adequate legal basis, and ordered six months of public information advertising on Italian television and radio.

The default matters as well. Improve the model for everyone is switched on for free, Plus and Pro accounts, and off for Enterprise, Business and Edu, and switching it off applies to new conversations rather than old ones.

OpenAI has spent the year selling privacy to the other half of its market, previewing zero data retention for enterprise customers in August.

Consumers get the setting that feeds the model.

“I don’t think they would imagine some contractor somewhere is analyzing the conversations,” one reviewer said. The same company has been asking those users to connect their bank accounts.