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Comment by throwaway89201 | Hacker News Reader

> and at the same time seemed to have lost the ability to centrally disable training on prompts for your entire organization

There is a toggle on https://admin.mistral.ai that allows you to disable training for both Vibe and Console/API for your entire organisation. And I'm not on the enterprise plan. I've disabled training the first time I created an account, and it has remained that way.

You story is also very confusing due to the wording around "opt-in by default" and "disappointed [about] opt-in to training" (most people would be disappointed about an opt-out) and probably conveys the wrong message to most people.

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I don't have that toggle (but could indeed have sworn I saw it earlier).

Sorry, I have always thought that "opting in" is, "opting for the presented option" and opting out is "opting out of it", so opting out [of sharing prompts for training] is choosing to not share, but apparently I was wrong my whole life. I'm not a native speaker, and I think most people here (in my country) would interpret this the way I do? Weird but TIL.

If you opt in it means that by default you're not in and you chose that option. So if you're now included in training by default, then it's an opt-out feature as in you can opt out of it.

Idk, feels like my brain does not have the model for this, this does not exist in my language afaik haha.

Opt-in = "we assume you are out unless you tell us you want to be in"

Opt-out = "we assume you are in unless you tell us you want to be out"

Replace opt with its equivalent “choose” and it becomes choose-(tobe-)in and choose-(tobe-)out.

Just remember, good company’s leave them off by default. Bad companies will turn them on for you.

You said it correctly, there’s no confusion.

Downvoted for knowing how to read

FWIW I don’t find what you wrote confusing, but I do think it is following a sort of… bad convention that some companies have been pushing.

Opt-in and opt-out describe the nature of the choice that you make. “Opt” means to choose (apparently it is a French word we stole). Opt-in means you have to proactively choose to be in. Opt-out means you have to proactively choose to be out. “Opt-in by default” is an overly verbose way of saying “opt-out.”

In either case it describes the choice that you need to proactively make to override the default behavior.

Edit: I should also say that it is a “known point of contention” where pro-privacy people have been pushing back on this phrasing. So, you have probably accidentally stumbled into an ongoing discussion, which is why some of the comments might be unexpectedly prickly.

>Edit: I should also say that it is a “known point of contention” where pro-privacy people have been pushing back on this phrasing. So, you have probably accidentally stumbled into an ongoing discussion, which is why some of the comments might be unexpectedly prickly.

Yes, because people will say that something should be opt-in, meaning off by default, and then someone makes it on by default and says 'oh, it's opt-in, you're just opted in by default!'

I 100% agree that “opt-in by default” is bad and that “opted” in that sense is a bullshit incoherent phrase. Unfortunately this “opting as a thing that happens to you instead of a choice” idea has evidently been promoted well, so we have to expect that people will unknowingly use it.

And suddenly we have laws directing AI companies to report bad behavior or potential rival candidates.

And some shadowy departments do this without needing any laws at all.

“Opt-in” means to agree to something. If something is “opt-in by default”, it means that it is opt-out and someone is using weasel wording and contract inducements to force you into something you didn’t actually agree to. Any “disagreement” is just people trying to advocate for what they wished it meant.

> I don't have that toggle (but could indeed have sworn I saw it earlier).

You don't see "Allow the use of your interactions with Vibe to train Mistral’s AI models" at https://admin.mistral.ai/vibe/privacy ?

And "Allow the use of your API calls to train Mistral’s AI models" at https://admin.mistral.ai/plateforme/privacy ?

The toggles I see

at https://admin.mistral.ai/vibe/privacy:

Allow public sharing of chats content

Allow user feedback on model responses

Chat Retention Policy

At https://admin.mistral.ai/plateforme/privacy I see

Allow the use of your API calls to train Mistral’s AI models.

Enable Labs models

So indeed, no "Allow the use of your interactions with Vibe to train Mistral’s AI models". I only see that setting here: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat?profile_dialog=privacy And I have to ask every user in my org to go and turn it off.

Mistral support just confirmed that the org-wide toggle was removed from the Team plan earlier this year and made exclusive to the enterprise tier. I bet that if you signed up earlier, they didn't remove it from your account, but it's not there for new customers. Which explains some of the confusion here.

Also explains that the community support in Discord insisted that the toggle should be there, moreover they told me the individual toggles on the user's pages wouldn't do anything because it defaulted to "off" for any organization, as per their docs until 2 days ago. But that changed.

Ok it (org wide toggle) just (24h after posting this) returned and the docs were changed again! They now include the text:

"Vibe (Teams): Administrators can disable data training usage for the entire organization."

That’s nice! Except that it was on for my entire org so I’ll be checking if they didn’t store anything first thing tomorrow. I wonder what changed their minds.

I think there is a simple, unambiguous way to describe this, which is to use the passive voice or an explicit subject with the past tense to clarify that you didn't do the opting in.

Saying "we were disappointed to be opted in to training by default" clarifies the point you're trying to make, which is that the toggle (whatever it may be called) was set to training by someone else, not you.

Actually in your case you'd say "...after being disappointed that the Pro tier opted us in to training on prompts by default", which gives an explicit subject ("the [Mistral] Pro tier"). No one will confuse that with the opposite "the Pro tier opted us out of training on prompts by default".

I think the trouble with "opted in to training by default" is that there was no "opting", i.e. no choosing. I can't come up with a better suggestion off the top of my head though!

No you're not wrong, but while I can't speak for this specific instance, in many other cases, this language is intentionally confusing in order to dark-pattern users into agreeing to the thing they don't want to. Similar is using ambiguous language next to a switch/checkbox that makes it difficult to tell exactly what each state means.

Imho, legally, one should always be 'opted out' of 'forced mingling of your ideas' without deliberately opting in. Same as for advertising, click-through tracking, and sociopsycho/marketing metrics. Like the old firewall rule (easier to handle opt-in/out that way than firewalls; like, how many people can run a firewall that way now?). Users should have it right in front of their face when they install something or register, too, not hidden among options. It might take the user five or ten more minutes to get to use the app but worth it.

My native-US-English speaker read:

“disappointed that the Pro tier was opted-in to training on prompts by default” [and required manually opting out]

“the Team tier was now also opted-in by default” [and required manually opting out]

In context of each sentence and the larger comment, read smoothly here.

Also - have seen more than one lively discussion on these phrases, since defaults can stick 95% of the time and Big Tech has done their best to be abusive about what they automatically enable for users by default for some time.

It's understandable but it is technically inconsistent and dilutes the meaning of opt-in. Opt implies an active choice, so you never are opting for the default.

It's also simply bad writing regardless of what meaning the reader takes from it. "Enabled by default" or "Allowed by default" are much clearer and more natural phrasings without any connotations of the user having taken an action to express a choice.

I also have these toggles, while being on a free plan. I must have set them to disabled at setup because that's how they are now.

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