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I think they are pretty clear that they train on some prompts, given they sell the ability to be excluded

How would they know for sure that some details were not part of some other training data they use? The authors may have discussed some tangential details on a forum for example, in which case you might argue that the model picked up on these details the authors assumed were benign but novel and worked out how to apply them to the problem.

Unless they know exactly the researcher’s account, they may not know in their end if he had the setting to let them train on his chat logs. They also probably don’t know if he had any correspondence on any forum where he may have discussed this and it got picked up by scrapers.

I’m not saying they didn’t do anything unethical. I’m just saying even if they were ethical, there’s plenty of practical reasons at their scale why a flat out denial is logistically difficult to do