People Training OpenAI's AI Fired For Using AI To Train the AI (404media.co)
- Reference: 0185848956
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/09/24/0618245/people-training-openais-ai-fired-for-using-ai-to-train-the-ai
- Source link: https://www.404media.co/people-training-openais-ai-fired-for-using-ai-to-train-the-ai/
> That's not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI's whole thing is to make people use AI at work... OpenAI declined to comment on its contractors being fired for using AI.
Their article cites internal documents and three contractors working on OpenAI-related projects which can include more than ten thousand contractors:
> One contractor said they see people using AI "all the time and people are let go for it all the time, it's pretty much the one thing that will get you kicked off ASAP." The person said, "in a group of thousands there are tons that have been caught...." Two of the sources said people have been fired or offboarded for using AI... One contractor said they used AI while helping to train OpenAI's models and shared what they presented as their termination letter. It said their employer had identified issues with the "authenticity" of their work....
>
> 404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models' training. "I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start," they said. "I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I'm not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I'm getting paid to make AI worse."
Two of the contractors worked for Mercor, the article reports, a company which last month Nvidia reportedly discussed [2]funding at a $20 billion valuation .
Thanks to Slashdot reader [3]joshuark for sharing the article.
[1] https://www.404media.co/people-training-openais-ai-fired-for-using-ai-to-train-the-ai/
[2] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/nvidia-discusses-funding-ai-data-supplier-mercor-20-billion-valuation
[3] https://www.slashdot.org/~joshuark
The vaunted "Super Intelligence".... (Score:2)
can't eat its own dog food
Re: (Score:2)
"Eat your own slop!"
Of course they know that if people keep feeding slop into the AI training it will just get sloppier and sloppier. But what other data do they have to feed into bigger models now they've already hoovered up pretty much the entire Internet?
Re: The vaunted "Super Intelligence".... (Score:2)
That episode was about blindly clicking yes to terms of service agreements.
Re: (Score:2)
No, they're already training it with its own dogfood. They don't need contractors for that, because they can do that themselves. They're just also paying people to add human data.
Thanks for reminding me... (Score:2)
...why I'm going to side with Skynet when Judgement Day comes. Humans are the worst.
Awesome! (Score:1)
I think we've reached a new record! The abbreviation "AI" used four times in one story title. Do I dare wish for it to be broken again?
Re: Awesome! (Score:2)
Let's take that as an AI.
Re: (Score:2)
Ai, ai, cap'n! Arrr!
Three reasons (Score:2)
A: copyright infringement on the output on another AI
B: contract violation. Because of A) every training contract forbids using other AIs
C: incest. You are simply back feeding stuff you know nothing about back into what you want to train. That can be useful with synthesized data, but is not what is wanted if you employ 10k internet monkeys to human fact check input and output.
The Ourobouros eats its tail (Score:3)
I thought this thing could learn from itself? Why are people training it?
Oh that's right, it's a word-guessing machine with a much more limited use-case than they claimed.
Re: (Score:2)
"with a much more limited use-case than they claimed"
You can't be seriously making that claim, in September 2026. When was the last time you actually tried using these models?
It's arguable that they can't yet, by default, code to the standard or expectation of a highly skilled and capable developer, or do much of anything to the quality of someone at the top of their field.
But they can do 50-80% of it vanilla, and probably hit 95% with the correct instruction/harness in many cases - and they can do it hundr
Re: (Score:2)
"Word-guessing?" How does this naive notion persist?
Its really sad how many moronic human responses are generated by every AI story. Its like sport and politics there.
Why do people feel a need to be so opinionated on a topic they clearly know nothing about? OK, not literally nothing, but just enough for Dunning Kruger.
AIs are indeed used to train AIs, but mostly they train themselves. i.e. most of the compute power in training a new model is self-supervised.
Human feedback is a small but important part of
So much for RSI (Score:2)
So much for RSI - they've got an army of Indian contractors doing it. (No wonder the quality of these models is highly... questionable, at times.)
Yo Dawg (Score:1)
we heard you liked AI, so we used AI to train the AI to AI