Mercor

OpenAI Contractors Manually Review Real User Chats in Project Lily

OpenAI has engaged hundreds of external contractors to analyze actual user conversations with ChatGPT as part of its model improvement efforts. The reviewers, working under project Lily, examine real queries that may contain personal, medical, or other sensitive information despite the use of a Privacy Filter. Contractors summarize prompts, compare four model responses, and assign ratings from one to seven while flagging behaviors such as excessive sycophancy or inappropriate emojis. User identities are hidden and some data is filtered, yet OpenAI acknowledged that not all personal information is reliably removed. The same human review process is also employed by Anthropic for its Claude model. Users can opt out of future training use through account settings, although prior data remains unaffected.