--- title: "OpenAI Has Hundreds of Workers Reading People’s Private Chats" description: "OpenAI has hundreds of contractors manually read and review ChatGPT prompts so it can \"improve\" the responses it gives." date: "2026-09-17" modified: "2026-09-17" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore.md" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/openai-workers-read-private-chats" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" - "OpenAI" --- # OpenAI Has Hundreds of Workers Reading People’s Private Chats ![A color-treated photo of a man staring at a laptop.]() *Shutterstock / Futurism* If you ever feel like [spilling your guts]() to ChatGPT, just know that you may have an audience. *404 Media* [reports]() that OpenAI is hiring hundreds of employees to sift through and read users' prompts — including messages that contain sensitive personal information. This isn't part of a moderation effort. Instead, by reviewing the prompts, OpenAI hopes to improve the responses that ChatGPT gives. The contractors rate and critique each of the AI's replies, with internal documents showing a focus on nudging ChatGPT away from anthropomorphizing itself and to be less sycophantic, *404* found. Both qualities — anthropomorphizing and sycophancy — have been heavily scrutinized for their role in so-called [AI psychosis](), cases in which an AI incites and drives a user's delusional behavior. Numerous lawsuits allege that an older, less restrained version of ChatGPT powered by GPT-4o [drove their users to suicide](). Still, there are tradeoffs. Many users would probably find this surveillance of their chats, part of an operation dubbed "Project Lily," to be an alarming invasion of [privacy]() — if they had any idea this was happening. Asked if they thought ChatGPT users knew about humans reading their chats, one of the employees replied: "No." "I don't think they would imagine some contractor somewhere... is analyzing the conversations," they told *404*. It's unclear how many prompts are being read or how OpenAI decides to select them. But some of them include chats in which the user explicitly asks ChatGPT to keep their conversations private, *404* found. The prompts that're selected are anonymized, but sometimes include personal information. The dashboard that the employees use also includes a "user memories summary" that can give details about previous conversations, which can produce details on where the user lives. When *404* reached out to OpenAI, the company said it used a "Privacy Filter" model to anonymize conversations, which its website [states]() "can make mistakes." OpenAI could reasonably be accused of acting quite shifty about this practice. It's well known at this point that it has [employees read messages for moderation and safety purposes](). But it didn't respond to *404's* question about if it explicitly told users that humans are reading prompts to improve the AI. Later, after *404* published its piece, it pointed to a page on its website stating that humans may review prompts to "improve model performance." Users can opt-out of this practice by turning off the "improve the model for everyone" setting, but this is enabled by default. Michal Luria, a senior research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told *404* that while human review can be "essential to safety," she noted that "chatbot interfaces automatically create a false sense of intimacy and privacy." "This is quite distinct from content moderation on social media, where publishing content already carries expectations of platform moderation and public exposure," Luria added. In any case, it does seem like OpenAI is feeling conscious about how its AI models sound. Employees, for example, flagged and wrote down cases of "AI-speak" and "unnecessary use of emojis," which [are common tell-tales of chatbot usage](). "It would be appropriate to include a tree emoji when planning Arbor Day celebrations," a document given to the employees explained, "but skull emojis when discussing death, or plane emojis when giving updates on a fatal crash, are not." The iceberg may go deeper. An FAQ section provided to the reviewers says that they don't need to worry about fact-checking the responses, and alludes to other project teams that "handle content verification." **More on OpenAI:** [*OpenAI Faces Congressional Probe Over Swarm Hacking Incident*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()