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                  Should You Let Claude Learn from Your Chats?

   Adam Engst

   On its blog, [1]Anthropic writes:

     Today, we're rolling out updates to our Consumer Terms and Privacy
     Policy that will help us deliver even more capable, useful AI
     models. We're now giving users the choice to allow their data to be
     used to improve Claude and strengthen our safeguards against harmful
     usage like scams and abuse. Adjusting your preferences is easy and
     can be done at any time.

     By participating, you'll help us improve model safety, making our
     systems for detecting harmful content more accurate and less likely
     to flag harmless conversations. You'll also help future Claude
     models improve at skills like coding, analysis, and reasoning,
     ultimately leading to better models for all users.

   On the flip side, the thought of AI companies training their models on
   chat transcripts sets off all sorts of privacy warning flags for many
   people, including me. My discomfort stems less from immediate
   real-world concerns than from the innumerable privacy abuses
   perpetrated by tech companies in pursuit of surveillance advertising
   dollars. Although it's theoretically possible for sensitive personal
   information, business details, or intellectual property (like code)
   absorbed into training data to leak directly in responses, that's both
   unlikely (quite literally, what are the odds?) and probably wouldn't
   happen for a year or two anyway, when the models currently in training
   become public. More concerning is that we don't know how AI may or may
   not enable future privacy abuses, and once data has been used for
   training, it's unlikely that it could be 'untrained' from the model.
   For now, it's better to err on the side of caution.

   I primarily use ChatGPT, where I've already turned off the option that
   lets OpenAI train future models on my chats. Now that Claude has the
   option to collect my conversations and hold onto them for five years,
   I'm turning that off too. Both of those are easy to disable in the
   settings, but Google makes it harder to turn off conversation
   collection for Gemini: the trick is to [2]turn off Gemini Apps
   Activity.

   I strongly recommend avoiding Meta AI, which trains on your
   conversations (and all public Facebook posts and Instagram photos)
   without allowing you to opt out, and Grok, which trains on all
   X/Twitter users' posts (including historical posts in otherwise
   inactive accounts) and Grok conversations unless you explicitly opt
   out. Beyond the privacy implications and poor track records of both
   companies, training models on often unverified, inflammatory, or
   misleading social media content risks perpetuating those same qualities
   in AI responses'a classic case of 'garbage in, garbage out.'

References

   1. https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms
   2. https://myactivity.google.com/product/gemini

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