OpenAI reportedly asks contractors to upload actual work from past jobs
Wired reports that OpenAI and training data company Handshake AI are asking third-party contractors to upload actual work they’ve done on past and current jobs.
This appears to be part of a larger strategy across AI companies that are hiring contractors to generate high-quality training data in hopes of eventually allowing their models to automate more white-collar jobs.
In OpenAI’s case, the company’s presentations reportedly ask contractors to describe tasks they have performed on other jobs and upload examples of “actual field work” they have “done”. These examples may include “specific output (actual files, not file summaries) (Word documents, PDFs, Powerpoint, Excel, images, repositories, etc.).”
The company reportedly instructs its contractors to remove proprietary and personally identifiable information before uploading, and directs its ChatGPT “Superstar Scrubing” tool to do so.
Nevertheless, intellectual property lawyer Evan Brown told Wired that AI labs that adopt this approach are “putting themselves at great risk” with an approach that requires “a great deal of trust in the contractors to decide what is and what is not confidential.”
An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment.
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