People Training OpenAI’s AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI
OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users’ prompts and other data to help improve the chatbot’s responses. The idea is that the contractors provide an, obviously, human touch to OpenAI’s models. Well, not all of the contractors are doing that.
- ▪OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users’ prompts and other data to help improve the chatbot’s responses.
- ▪The idea is that the contractors provide an, obviously, human touch to OpenAI’s models.
- ▪Well, not all of the contractors are doing that.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
404 Media files mainly under tech. We currently carry 111 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/people-training-openais-ai-fired-for-using-ai-to-train-the-ai/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 22 Sep 2026 12:59:12 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-22T13:03:51.600Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-22T13:03:51.600Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | kSp9K8K_nNGE · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| 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. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
OpenAI has an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users’ prompts and other data to help improve the chatbot’s responses. The idea is that the contractors provide an, obviously, human touch to OpenAI’s models. Well, not all of the contractors are doing that. 404 Media has found multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI’s models have been 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.Some AI models already exhibit signs of “model collapse,” which is where AI models further trained on AI-generated text can become worse and worse.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from 404 Media
