Believe it or not, (and although it may not seem like it) ChatGPT is still very much in the early stages of its development. And as such, it remains in an ongoing period of collecting feedback from every single user, in order to make the artificial intelligence service even better.
So, does Chatgpt learn from users? And what does this really mean? Yes, it can learn from interactions with users, and in the standard modes, all conversations are stored for potential further training of future models, but not in ways that are identifiable or can be tied back to individual users.
Continue reading for an explainer!
Training an AI Chat Bot
ChatGPT’s natural language model was originally trained by using large bodies of text from the internet that were generated before 2021, and which included scientific papers, books, news articles, and even Wikipedia. You can see the sources used to train ChatGPT here.
However, this is the reason why sometimes the AI chatbot is unable to give clear, logical and concise answers to the prompts that you give it about recent events or information, because it doesn’t have a database from which to access current data from.
Basically, this means that ChatGPT works simply by responding to patterns that it finds in the text that it was trained from.
This is also the reason why ChatGPT uses the prompts that you give it to learn more about how us humans interact in normal conversation.
Does ChatGPT Learn From Users?
For fun, we decided to ask the AI chatbot for its response to our question, Does ChatGPT learn from its users?, and this is what it generated:
Yes, ChatGPT is a machine learning model that can learn from its interactions with users. As users provide input prompts and feedback on the generated responses, the model can use this information to improve its understanding of language and generate more accurate and relevant responses in the future. However, it’s important to note that ChatGPT is not capable of retaining personal information or learning specific details about individual users.
So, if we are to believe the AI itself, ChatGPT doesn’t retain any personal information from users, although we have to say that it would probably be silly to share any of your private data in a prompt in the first place.
However, in order to process and generate the most relevant and factual information to user prompts, it can and does use the information inputted, although it apparently isn’t associated with personal information.
Whether you believe that or not is totally up to you.
Control What You Can
Whenever you receive generated text output from ChatGPT, there is some control that you do have, in regard to how much it is able to learn from the prompt that you give it.
Whenever you receive generated text output from ChatGPT, there is some control that you do have, in regard to how much it is able to learn from the prompt that you give it.
For instance, if the AI chatbot hallucinates and gives you an incorrect answer to your prompt, (which isn’t an uncommon occurrence), then you can respond by clicking the available Thumbs Down button.
A new text box will pop up if you do this, which will allow you to enter any additional comment or feedback you have and give you a chance to explain why you’re doing so. OpenAI will then consider your feedback, which can be used to help improve the AI chatbot’s service.
However, even if you don’t enter a response to the text output generated by ChatGPT, it is very possible that AI trainers will review any ‘conversations’ that you have with the chatbot.
According to OpenAI itself, “We review conversations to improve our systems and to ensure the content complies with our policies and safety requirements.”
Final Thoughts
The latest artificial intelligence tools that are now proliferating the internet are ever-evolving technologies, and so is the natural large language model that ChatGPT is based on. Although this means that it allows the service to only get better and better as time goes by, you should also be aware that nothing you share with the AI chatbot in your prompts is completely private.
So, does ChatGPT learn from users? The simple answer is yes, which is why the chatbot, which is now on version 4 as of publication, has ironed out some of the issues of previous versions as its AI gets smarter.
