alt Hacker NewsIn OpenAI's case, if they were genuinely unsure, they wouldn't have said anything. "We cannot rule out" means they absolutely 100% for-sure did look at the existing prompts and bootstrapped from that, and they are trying to get ahead of the disclosure with this weasel-wording.
Also possible: we're 99.999% sure, but a lawyer said to be safe and strictly accurate, we should stick in a sentence in saying we can't be perfectly sure, since it's infeasible for us to prove it.
I promise you that if we took their work from ChatGPT and stuck in a bunch of weasel words to give the opposite impression while remaining technically true, I would quit on the spot.
(I work at OpenAI.)