‘It’s destroyed me completely’: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models
theguardian.com
Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.
Cool. Using slave labor to train tools to strip the best parts of humanity away from us so that AI can do creative activities like poetry and art while we're more and more stuck in a gig economy.
Cool cool cool cool.
Let me stop you right there. The current concept of "AI"--otherwise known as Large Language Models because that is really what people are referring to--is not capable of creativity. ChatGPT and things like it just regurgitate stuff they find. They can't create something new and original
It creates things. Whether it is truly “creative” in the sense that humans are “creative”, doesn’t really matter. Now, you might respond by saying that it only regurgitates, but I would argue that many if not all human creative outputs are, at least to some degree, “regurgitations” in the same sense. I am not disregarding art, just saying that art is always derivative to some degree.
It doesn't really matter though. It will take away jobs from people in creative industries that only creative people were able to do before. The end result is basically the same.
Why would AI that can't be creative take jobs from people that are capable of being creative?
Because it's not the AI that's taking away jobs, but the executives hoping to cut costs regardless of creativity, quality, or ethics.
So then blame the real problem, which is not new and has always been the main enemy: capitalism and its demand for seeking profits despite any consequences.
That has nothing to do with "AI" and still doesn't have anything to do with the original claim of whether or not the new wave of LLMs are capable of creativity.
I am. That's the thing that I'm blaming. The claim I was making was that OpenAI has engaged in violent colonialism inherent to capitalism with the goal of making Elon rich, and the rest of us poor.
Bookmarking isn't the same as boosting, but it's the best I can do. Keep screaming it from the rooftops my dude, dudette, or non binary doodling
Because businesses dont want to pay for labor. They dont care about what quality we get as consumers
I know it's not. That's why it's so sad that people are offloading creative work to it
It is true that LLMs and DPMs do not create, they interpolate -- that's why training data and curation of that data is so critical to begin with. Nevertheless, it is correct to say they are being used for "creative activities" as cheap and (in my opinion) unsustainable substitutes for human minds.
AI is about at creative as Adobe Photoshop is, or a pencil for that matter. A human operating it (no, not txt2img prompting) is where the creativity comes from.
Yeah that's a bullshit take on AI
But that's exactly what's happening. Bloodsucking capitalists have decided that AI is a cheaper option than paying people a living wage, so creatives are losing their jobs.
Instead of actually learning how to create art, shitbag grifters claim theyre "taking the power back from creatives" and doing nothing but stealing from actual creatives to make some sort of soulless synthesis, leaving actual creatives high and dry. For just one example, look at how many publishing outlets have stopped taking submissions because of the overwhelming flood of AI spam.
All the while people are out here trying to make ends meet and are being forced into shitty, low paid jobs or gig work
I think he/she was referring to the sole purpose of AI being developed is to create an additional subscription model that serves both ads and bullshit, locked to infrastructure of google or metas choice.
Your complaint here is entirely with capitalism and has nothing to do with AI. It's a legitimate concern, but it;s fart larger problem than new ways of making pictures. Aim your opprobrium at the correct targets
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There's nothing to elaborate on. It's a stupid position put about by luddites and perpetuated by people with no understanding of the subject. It's so not on target it's not even wrong!
I'm a DevOps engineer. I work with big technology every day. I am very definitively not a Luddite. But the way the capitalists controlling our economy view and want to use AI is harmful to us, the lower and middle classes. I'm not sure which part of my view is so stupid that it enters into psuedoscience, leading me to not even being wrong
You're so close. Keep going. Where's the root cause of the problem?
I could not make it any clearer I think the root cause is capitalism. That you're putting the focus elsewhere is exhausting
No I agree. Keep going... Why are you therefore daemonising AI rather than focusing your ire where it belongs?
I'm not demonizing AI. I'm demonizing OpenAI, the shitty company. I'm demonizing CEOs and publishing executives who think they can pass off an inferior product vomited out by a robot record scratching the entire history of human creativity while we get stuck doing bullshit jobs for Uber, DoorDash, Fiverr, and the rest.
You think I have a position on AI that I don't and it's exhausting repetitively explaining to you that I don't think AI is the problem, I think capitalism is. What part of what I am saying is not clear? Why do you want to treat me like a moron luddite for something I don't believe and didn't say? I'm more and more getting the impression that you and I are on the same page about this but you're inserting a position onto me I do not hold.
That's why I said this is exhausting. In fact you're exhausting. In fact, I feel like I'm being a jerk and I'm starting to think you're a jerk
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Why not?
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Starvation wages are slavery. And yes. Our techocolonial society engages at it at many levels. No. We should not be okay with it. We should do what we can do disengage from businesses that engage in it, and we should be self forgiving of ourselves when we can't. We should always be advocating for the workers, even if sometimes that means who we're advocating for is us
Average wages in Nairobi is about $4/hr. These jobs weren't generally high quality but they weren't starvation, either.
You're gonna get a lot of flak for that take, even though I agree with most of the rest of your post. Let's reframe the problem: you're currently paid a low wage. It's barely enough to pay for food, rent, and getting to and from your job.
You want to leave that job for one you know pays better, but it's farther away. Even if you get the job and have the better income, you would be spending the net gains on the extra costs of commuting: it ends up being a wash.
You would move closer, but because your current wage doesn't allow you to save money, you can't afford the costs of moving, let alone a down payment on a house or a deposit on an apartment.
You would get better educated so you qualify for better paying jobs, but again, you have no savings from your current job to pay for schooling, and you have no/bad credit to afford a student loan.
All the problems arrayed against you require money to solve, and because you're "cheap labor" you're never able to gather enough money to solve them. You're forcibly stuck with your current job. They pay you, yes, but you can't leave. You're "free" to leave, but that's just saying you're free to lose your home and starve. Now none of these problems are unique to Kenya, I could be describing any country with poor Economic Mobility, I could be describing any job or industry. Globalization was important for many reasons, but it has allowed companies to identify the parts of the world where labor is cheapest and pay them... exactly what they're "worth."
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Whether or not we call it slavery, it is for sure a gross exploitation of labour. The article reminds us that we in the so-called 'western world' can only afford their luxury life because there's someone elsewhere who pays the price.
People elsewhere pay the price, but it's not in any way necessary for Western quality of life, because all it "affords" us is massive wealth inequality in our own countries, which leads to other problems like rising housing costs and severely skewed influence in politics.
Cut down on stupidly high profits for a very small group of people, by not stealing labor, and huge sections of people in other countries can have decent pay and work conditions.
They can leave the job but they will still carry the psychological scars from it. They were not receiving adequate mental health support for the severity of the content they had to deal with.
You comment inspired this thought: The older I get, the less I have faith in psychological support making us whole. I still think it should be part of work like this but the damage can be as permanent as losing a limb. What is that worth in money? (hypothetical)
That's definitely something to consider. Psychological support helps people with coping but it doesn't remove the trauma. Anyone willing to do this sort of work deserves to be very well compensated.
But all that said, it isn't even unique to AI that there is a need for people to sift through the worst stuff imaginable to prevent everyone else from being exposed. All user-generated internet content has that problem.
Only rich people can afford new clothes every month, and if you think computer makers are passing on the savings of their exploitative practices to their customers, I've got a bridge to sell you.
The average cost of living is somewhere around $650 for one person, and those wages are a bit low but the higher end is above average for the country.
(I don't know how accurate this data is, but based on https://livingcost.org/cost/kenya/United-States)
I'm not saying they shouldn't be paid better or more, but those wages aren't as outlandish as they sound for the country.
And here I must be crazy thinking if it is US company paying them, maybe they deserve the equivalent of US employees, no matter what the fucking local pay is.
That "local pay" bullshit is just an excuse to exploit. Pay them what you would have to pay a US citizen for the same job or fuck right off. They don't deserve less because of geographic location.
Local pay for an international company is theft
I’m not sure I follow the logic here
To be honest, this isn't an AI problem, but a content moderation and labor force ethics problem. You can swap out AI with social media and you'll find the same amount of psychological harm to moderators.
Is there anything that can be done to make content moderation less traumatizing? ~Strawberry
Good question! It's probably the most psychologically damaging job out there.
Ironically, maybe with AI? But that would mean we would have to train a model to recognize the worst images and videos possible...which means gathering all of that data...which means whomever trains that model will be scarred...actually, maybe not a good idea...
So nothing?... ~Strawberry
It's a tough problem to solve! It's definitely beyond my expertise.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts, and some images, many depicting graphic scenes of violence, self-harm, murder, rape, necrophilia, child abuse, bestiality and incest, the petitioners say.
“We are in agreement with those who call for fair and just employment, as it aligns with our mission – that providing meaningful, dignified, living wage work is the best way to permanently lift people out of poverty – and believe that we would already be compliant with any legislation or requirements that may be enacted in this space,” the Sama spokesperson said.
In sample passages read by the Guardian, text that appeared to have been lifted from chat forums, include descriptions of suicide attempts, mass-shooting fantasies and racial slurs.
The announcement coincided with an investigation by Time, detailing how nearly 200 young Africans in Sama’s Nairobi datacenter had been confronted with videos of murders, rapes, suicides and child sexual abuse as part of their work, earning as little as $1.50 an hour while doing so.
She wants to see an investigation into the pay, mental health support and working conditions of all content moderation and data labeling offices in Kenya, plus greater protections for what she considers to be an “essential workforce”.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!
A bot giving a summary of an article about people doing the work to train AI bots is some real snake-eating-its-own-tail shit.
Thankfully this one doesn't require AI. You can generally find the most important sentences in an article by counting the occurrences of every unique word, throwing out the common articles (e.g. a, an, the), and then extracting the sentences which contain the most frequently used words.
Imagine seeing furries in action for the first time.