The author of the original mastodon post, Andreas Thom, acknowledged that he had not opted his data out of being used for training until June 29 of this year. He spends most of the post lashing out at OpenAI for not being transparent about whether his data was trained on (when the answer is obviously yes).

People need to understand how all these AI company policies around training data work before working with them, because it seems that people have no clue. Some things you should internalize:

  1. Opt your data out of training with the AI companies. There are multiple reasons why this isnt an airtight solution (see the following)

  2. Never press the feedback button. Once you do, your entire conversation will get slurped up, retained, and used in training data. This is especially important with coding agents because they can sometimes be too trigger-happy with a root directory find command, which can expose a *ton* of your personal data without you even knowing.

  3. Understand ai lab-specific policies. For instance, Anthropic / Claude Code has data opt-outs, but commits to keeping (for 7 years) and training on any of your chats that trigger their safety classifiers, even if they're false positives! Anyone remotely familiar with CC over the years understands how easy it is to trigger their safety classifiers.

  4. Providers of open models will not be any more charitable with the use of your data than the large US labs. For some reason, I've noticed here that people have a fairly loose security/IP posture around open-model providers because "I'm not doing anything important." It's very difficult to properly judge the importance of your data, and whether or not it can or will be used against you. The best posture is to always be more paranoid than less.

Another post that made it on the front page presented as fact that OpenAI "stole" the proof from Thom. There's no excuse to use one's own ignorance as a reason to fan the flames of anger towards AI companies. Like, we need to pump the brakes here because things are getting unnecessarily nasty, and it's not hard to imagine a mentally unwell person who sees stuff like this feeling motivated to do bad things.

If it is found that OpenAI and other labs are not respecting the training opt out then, I agree, there is reason to raise a commotion. But, with Thom and Buckmaster, accusations of malice are more better explained by incompetence (naivete).

edit: i'm sure i'm going to be accused of being some bot shill of the AI labs again but, people, this stuff all falls under the umbrella of common sense opsec.