You Can Stop Training ChatGPT With Your Questions and Conversations

Every time you interact with ChatGPT, you’re actually training it to be better. It takes your conversations and uses that experience to make future conversations more useful and accurate for everyone. That’s a good thing for both ChatGPT, as well as anyone who wants to see their chats with the bot improve overtime. As long as AI doesn’t take over the world, that sounds fine to me.

Of course, it also has the downside of being a bit invasive from a privacy perspective. OpenAI takes anything you ask ChatGPT for its own purposes, which, while not necessarily nefarious, can feel a bit creepy if you don’t want the company using your conversations as fodder for its large language model. (Although, it is funny to imagine that I improved ChatGPT by asking it to write me a horror story about a killer clove of garlic.)

While OpenAI wants as much training data as possible for its AI system, it seems happy to compromise in the name of user privacy, as evidenced by the company’s latest change: OpenAI announced Wednesday that users can now disable their chat histories within ChatGPT, which, by extension, disables training as well. When you disable your chat history in ChatGPT, no new chats will save to your dashboard, although the company will retain those chats for 30 days to monitor for abuse. Those chats will be permanently deleted thereafter.

It’s good OpenAI is adding more options for users to control their privacy: The company suffered a data breach last month that exposed some user’s names, email addresses, home address, and credit card information (last four digits and expiration). Increasing the ability for users to take their personal data in their hands will make ChatGPT and OpenAI a more secure place.

How to disable Chat History & Training in ChatGPT

To disable Chat History and ChatGPT training, open ChatGPT in a new browser window. Click your account email in the bottom left corner of the screen, then choose “Settings.” Click “Show” next to Data Controls, then click the toggle next to “Chat History & Training.”

Of course, the big drawback to disabling this feature is losing the built-in archive of conversations OpenAI automatically catalogues for you. If you’re someone who likes to revisit your ChatGPT chats, you’ll want to copy and paste them somewhere else before you close out of the window. If that’s too much of a hassle, it might be worth the privacy hit to let your chats be apart of ChatGPT’s training. After all, it could be cool to tell the next generation that you played a small part in the robot uprising.

[Mashable]