In Brief

OpenAI reportedly asking contractors to upload real work from past jobs

OpenAI and training data company Handshake AI are asking third-party contractors to upload real work that they did in past and current jobs, according to a report in Wired.

This appears to be part of a larger strategy across AI companies that are hiring contractors to generate high-quality training data in the hopes that this will eventually allow their models to automate more white-collar work.

In OpenAI’s case, a company presentation reportedly asks contractors to describe tasks they’ve performed at other jobs and upload examples of “real, on-the-job work” that they’ve “actually done.” These examples can include “a concrete output (not a summary of the file, but the actual file), e.g., Word doc, PDF, Powerpoint, Excel, image, repo.”

The company reportedly instructs contractors to delete proprietary and personally identifiable information before uploading, and it points them to a ChatGPT “Superstar Scrubbing” tool to do so.

Nonetheless, intellectual property lawyer Evan Brown told Wired that any AI lab taking this approach is “putting itself at great risk” with an approach that requires “a lot of trust in its contractors to decide what is and isn’t confidential.”

An OpenAI spokesperson declined to comment.

Related