Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats
OpenAI is employing hundreds of contractors to read and evaluate real user prompts from ChatGPT to enhance the quality and safety of the chatbot's responses. These human reviewers assess conversations that may contain sensitive personal data, despite OpenAI's efforts to anonymize the inputs using a privacy filter. The practice highlights a significant privacy concern for users who may not realize their intimate details are being scrutinized by third-party workers.
- ▪OpenAI hires contractors to review real user prompts and rate the chatbot's generated replies to improve model performance.
- ▪Internal documents indicate that reviewers are tasked with reducing anthropomorphism and sycophancy in ChatGPT's responses.
- ▪OpenAI uses a Privacy Filter to remove personal information, but acknowledges that sensitive details can still reach the human reviewers.
- ▪Anthropic has also confirmed that it utilizes human review processes to improve its own AI models.
- ▪Contractors work in three stages: reading the prompt, summarizing the user's intent, and critiquing the AI's response.
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| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/inside-project-lily-the-humans-reading-your-chatgpt-chats/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 14 Sep 2026 14:22:43 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-14T14:26:51.290Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-14T14:26:51.290Z |
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| Cluster | rd-EqpLFcAyk · 1 stories |
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| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
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Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
OpenAI is hiring hundreds of contractors who read a massive stream of real users’ ChatGPT prompts, with the prompts sometimes including sensitive personal information, 404 Media has learned. The prompts these people review can include whole conversations between users and the chatbot, conversations that most of ChatGPT’s more than 900 million users probably don’t realize may be read by actual people.The goal of these prompt review teams is to improve the responses ChatGPT gives to its users, with the contractors rating and critiquing the chatbot’s generated replies.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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