Contractors Training OpenAI's Models Fired for Using AI Themselves

404 Media reports that multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI's models have been fired for using AI to do their own work. One contractor said that in a group of thousands, many have been caught, and that it is essentially the one offense that gets you removed immediately.

The contractors review real ChatGPT conversations and rate the model's responses; some projects involve more than ten thousand contractors. Internal documents bar reviewers from using AI themselves, including Grammarly and AI translation, and forbid AI-detection tools like GPTZero on the grounds that they are unreliable. Many contractors work through the AI-training company Mercor, whose spokesperson confirmed that contracts strictly prohibit using LLMs and that confirmed violators are removed from projects. OpenAI declined to comment.

The report also quotes one contractor who has trained models for several AI companies saying they sometimes deliberately chose the worst responses to sabotage training. The core facts rest on anonymous sources and internal documents, and the prevalence of firings cannot be independently verified; but if AI-generated content is entering the labeling pipeline, the reliability of human-feedback data itself is in question.