Did you know... Thumbs up on AI front-ends is not necessarily a “Like” button

I discovered something today that I suspect a lot of AI users may not realise. I’ve been pressing 👍 on ChatGPT responses because I thought it meant: "Yes, this is a good response, this is the register and style I want, please give me more responses like this!!!" In other words, I assumed that it was helping to customise my own experience, to my own advantage. OpenAI’s documentation says that if you provide thumbs-up or thumbs-down feedback, the entire conversation associated with that feedback may be used to train its models, even if you have otherwise opted out of model training. That surprised me because a thumbs-up has a very well-established meaning online: "Like". It does not intuitively communicate that the surrounding conversation may now be used for model improvement. This matters because some people tell AI systems things they would never post publicly: medical information, relationship problems, work issues, family details, your health or personal demons! in my own case, I pressed 👍on a long and rambling conversation about AI sentience that included some embarrassing material that I posted whe slightly drunk (I'd just had an argument with my adolescent son - oh dear, eeeee!!). I’ve now made a GDPR request asking exactly what happened to the conversations where I submitted feedback. And, yes, those conversations have been flagged up in the initial GPPR report. I have now asked them to clarify exactly what they did with my data. I’m not suggesting that pressing 👍 means exactly that somebody at OpenAI sits down and reads your conversation, before passing it round their team. I have no evidence. My question is about informed expectations and interface design. Did you know this was what the feedback button could do, and when you press 👍 on an AI response, that you might be sending the whole chat out of your private space?? submitted by /u/Dry_Ad9703 [link] [comments]

Source: r/ChatGPT | 2026-08-26