Comment by throwaway89201

16 hours ago

> 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.

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.

  • 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!'

      2 replies →

  • 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.

  • > 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 ?

  • 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".

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.