OpenAI has hired hundreds of contractors to read a continuous stream of real ChatGPT users' conversations as part of an internal effort to improve the chatbot's responses, according to an investigation published by 404 Media, raising fresh privacy questions for a service used by more than 900 million people worldwide.

The report, based on leaked internal documents, training materials and real prompts reviewed by 404 Media, details an OpenAI initiative internally codenamed Project Lily. Under the program, contractors known as "prompt reviewers" read anonymized excerpts of real user conversations with ChatGPT, write a summary of what the user was attempting to accomplish, and then critique and rate multiple versions of the chatbot's generated responses on a scale of one to seven.

According to the internal materials reviewed by 404 Media, the reviewers are working to steer ChatGPT toward specific behavioral targets, including training the chatbot to be less sycophantic, to use fewer emojis, to avoid excessive "AI-speak," and to adopt more restrained, professional language. The report notes that OpenAI's earlier GPT-4o model faced criticism for being overly sycophantic, a trait that multiple lawsuits have alleged contributed to several people's suicides, underscoring why OpenAI has prioritized correcting that behavior in later training efforts.

Each conversation presented to reviewers is accompanied by what the documents describe as a "user memories summary," an overview of the user's past interactions with ChatGPT that can include........

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