Having one chatbot train another could be a recipe for disasterfotograzia/Getty Images
People who are paid to train new AI models by supplying them with high-quality conversation and tests are cheating and using chatbots like ChatGPT to do the job instead, multiple whistleblowers have told New Scientist. The seemingly widespread practice risks undermining the future of AI, as it could lead to the “collapse” of more advanced models.
Most AI models operating today were trained on text and data scraped from the internet. But as models have scaled up, requiring yet more training data, AI firms have begun using workers who carry out conversations and tests with AI, in the hope that the resulting high-quality data can improve the power and usefulness of future large language models (LLMs).
These workers are normally employed by third parties, rather than AI companies directly, and are often working without full-time contracts and for low pay. That can incentivise them to take shortcuts like using chatbots to complete tasks faster, according to a worker called Alice*, despite this being against company policies.
“It’s very widespread; every company I’ve worked for has had explicit guidelines around it and they clearly do try to catch people out, so I think they do care. But I don’t think they can stop it,” says Alice.
