What it means to turn off the Training Data

I am a big fan of Steve Little's and Mark Thompson's podcast, "The Family History AI Show". Their show always makes me crave more so I began listening to other AI podcasts as well like "The Neuron: AI Explained"  A recent episode discussed Meta's launch of their AI "Muse". Grant Harvey and Corey Noles discuss the generous 100 million token allowance for free users. They read the terms of service and note that when you use the Meta Muse FREE account - to quote Grant, "They (Meta) can do anything they want with your data." Musing about Muse, I wondered, "What would they want to do with MY data?"

So of course, I posed that question to Claude. Already a Claude user, it has a history of my use for genealogy. Here is what Claude replied when I asked why it would want to train on my data:

"Your chats are valuable for that stage in a few specific ways. They are real rather than invented test prompts. They show niche, expert work (reading an 18th-century plat, citing a county court order book) that is thin on the open web. They capture multi-turn corrections, which is how the model learns what it got wrong. And they are increasingly scarce, since publishers and archives now block crawlers, so user conversations have become one of the few growing sources of fresh, high-quality text."

Regarding the "block crawlers" - I fall into the "publishers" category and while I share genealogical information freely, the crawlers drove up server costs so we had to install Cloudflare. At the time this was happening in 2021, we everyday folks had no idea that it was AI crawlers building their knowledge-base. 

Leaving the training data toggle switch on, allows Claude to use your data for five years. So I asked again, "Why me? And if I turned it off, would it delete my work?"

Muse billboard in rural Central California

Claude's reply: "The reason the “why me” feeling is reasonable is that the pool only works if it includes people like you. Millions of casual users asking for recipes and email drafts teach the model to do recipes and email drafts. The rare person transcribing colonial court records, reasoning through land grants, or correcting a bad citation teaches it something the other millions can’t. From a training standpoint your conversations are more useful than average precisely because they are unusual. That is a compliment to your work and also the best argument for keeping it out: the more distinctive the content, the less "lost in the crowd” it really is."

I had already toggled it off before I started this thread, but I just wanted to ensure this did not negatively impact my work because when items are deleted, they are permanently deleted after thirty days. If the setting is on, retention can be up to five years. Data already in a training run that has started, or in a model already trained, cannot be removed. (Anthropic Privacy Center)

A couple of caveats on Muse you should know: even with a free account, you still have to provide a payment card. From Mindwiredai: 

"You cannot start on the free tier without adding a payment card. Meta’s reasoning is that subscriptions kick in as usage rises, so the card has to be there first. You are not charged unless you upgrade or approve a purchase — but “free” and “give us a card” are two different sentences, and only one of them made the press release. Free tiers this large are never charity, and Meta hasn’t pretended otherwise. In a September 8 interview with journalist Alex Heath, Zuckerberg described the plan: Meta expects to eventually take “a very small cut” when Muse helps you make money, save money, or complete a purchase."

Some free account users have reported using Muse on the web and not having to provide a credit card. Do read the full terms of service so you are not caught unaware if the fees are implemented. From their TOS:

"Fees. Meta may decide to offer Muse for free for a limited period, may decide to allow a free trial from time to time, or may decide to charge for use of Muse. Meta reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to modify or discontinue offering Muse for free, including any free trials, at any time and without prior notice, unless where required by law."

Two things set Muse apart from Meta AI proper. From Engadget, "US users have no option to opt out of training and since December last year, the company has used Meta AI chats for ad targeting, also without a way to decline."

I had also turned off training data on ChatGPT last week. So where does that leave Muse and it's generous 100 million tokens? I guess it depends on how you feel about your content being used for training as to whether you decide to toggle it off.