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Tech companies pay poor Kenyans to produce training data for AI
- nl 8y agoTo be clear (and to no one's surprise): No one is paying poor Kenyans to program self-driving cars. They are being paid to label data.
- themihai 8y agoYeah...the title is totally misleading. They basically resolve captchas
- nithinm 8y agoexactly, misleading title
- billfruit 8y agoWhile the main stream media is eager to portray fakenews as the gravest threat to free society, this type of clickbait headline writing essentially exposes their duplicity. So while the press like to pontificate from their ivory towers on their unalloyed noble purpose, they are ultimately human institutions, with all its ensuing fallibility, all its flaws.
- kopo 8y agoIt's more complicated than that. Matt Taibbi - "As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become. This is the second stage of the mass media deception originally described in Manufacturing Consent. First, we’re taught to stay within certain bounds, intellectually. Then, we’re all herded into separate demographic pens, located along different patches of real estate on the spectrum of permissible thought. Once safely captured, we’re trained to consume the news the way sports fans do. We root for our team, and hate all the rest. Hatred is the partner of ignorance, and we in the media have become experts in selling both." https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway https://taibbi.substack.com/p/introduction-the-fairway
- nmstoker 8y agoYes, and it's a shame because there's still plenty of value to be had from the article. It's obvious that the end comment from the reporter is untrue, since by no definition could the workers be said to be becoming "AI experts" even if this is for some a step towards doing more challenging jobs. It feels like it could be a combination of the reporters lack of knowledge, sloppy phrasing and getting carried away withthe enthusiasm with the situation.
- zeroname 8y agoI understand the contention, but I don't think it's all that poor of a wording. In the end, who has more influence on the behavior of a neural network: The guy who wrote maybe a few dozen lines setting up its architecture, or the people who labeled the training data? You should at least try to come up with an alternative headline that conveys to the average reader what is happening here, because "labeling data for machine learning" is not something that works either.
- nl 8y agoYou should at least try to come up with an alternative headline that conveys to the average reader what is happening here, because "labeling data for machine learning" is not something that works either. "Poor Kenyans are training A.I. for big tech"
- sandGorgon 8y agois there an opensource product to manage this kind of labeling ? features should include double entry, statistical error checking , etc
- gajju3588 8y agoIts not open source but this tool helps in managing labeling by your in-house team or contractual workers. It also provides you annotation software for most of image and text usecases. Here is link to the same. http://dataturks.com http://dataturks.com
- sandGorgon 8y agothanks ! but we would prefer something that had open source availability (the gitlab model) as a fallback measure. im seeing labelbox and i think they follow that - https://www.labelbox.com/ https://www.labelbox.com/
- ah- 8y agoCheck out https://pybossa.com/ https://pybossa.com/
- nmstoker 8y agoHaven't tried it out but from a quick inspection, this looks like it might be suitable: https://github.com/NaturalIntelligence/imglab https://github.com/NaturalIntelligence/imglab
- mmerlin 8y agoVGG Image Annotator https://gitlab.com/vgg/via/ https://gitlab.com/vgg/via/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wrong_variable 8y agoThis is wonderful news !! - By sending dollars to Kenya it's helping reduce inflation for the Kenyan govt. The biggest problem for many developing countries is finding a way to get their hands on the global reserve currency. - Its allowing private wealth to be created (by women !!), empowering women have very positive cascading effects in a country (fertility rate drops, women have personal freedom to do other things ). Private wealth directly in the pocket of Kenyans is one the most efficient ways the developed world can help the developing world. Normally giving cash to the govt results in looting of public coffers. - Teaching useful computer skills to the average kenyan.
- themihai 8y agoI don't think they pay them that much for data entry/labelling but yeah... a job is a job.
- iguy 8y agoWell according to TFA they pay over 4x the going day wage. That sounds like quite a raise to me.
- themihai 8y agoIt's not bad but why do they feel the need to eat sh? They could have said just that "we pay 4x the going day wage and we want to maximise our profits" instead of that BS: "we don't want to disrupt the labour market so we keep the wages for their own good."
- iguy 8y agoMy guess is that the guy they interviewed spends his weekends hanging out with NGO types. How else would you get invited to any parties in Nairobi? And they love this stuff... saying "everybody profits" makes you sound like a cold-hearted evil capitalist.
- knieveltech 8y ago
- themihai 8y ago>> "But one thing that's critical in our line of work is to not pay wages that would distort local labour markets. If we were to pay people substantially more than that, we would throw everything off. That would have a potentially negative impact on the cost of housing, the cost of food in the communities in which our workers thrive." What a joke! We don't to pay them more because they will be able to buy decent house/invest in infrastructure or god forbid even start a small business...that would totally distort local labour markets, right?
- knieveltech 8y agoAgreed, that is a particularly offensive line of bullshit. Labor arbitrage is a thing, sure, but it takes a special flavor of insipid shithead to try to unfurl that kind of tortured logic to handwave past the obvious exploitation taking place.
- zeroname 8y agoHow is it exploitation? These are some of the best jobs available to people coming from the slums. The real reason that they don't pay more is of course: They don't have to. That's not what the white media people (desperate for yet another "exploitation" story) want to hear though, so you gotta make up some "social" reason. If these people were paid more, the whole business would just move to the next cheapest place, possibly in another country. That's the peril of unskilled labor everywhere. You can't fix it by fiat.
- coldtea 8y ago>That's the peril of unskilled labor everywhere. You can't fix it by fiat. Actually you can. Forbid companies to outsource labor outside their target market country, or impose heavy tariffs, and voila. That will mean less cheap gadgets in said market country (e.g. US), but more actual jobs, and a healthier middle class (and thus economy), and thus better access to necessities. This will also force third world countries to actually become competitive in quality and delivery, not just throw sweatshop-like labor (including from children and in some cases, slaves) and cheaper dangerous working conditions at the problem.
- BonfaceKilz 8y agoClick bait title
- nmstoker 8y agoYou can give the BBC feedback on it here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/20039682 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/20039682 I did - I like the idea they cover this, I just don't want it to be misleading
- dang 8y agoYes. We changed it; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18372058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18372058.
- baybal2 8y agoThat's closer to human captcha solving business. I wonder, if Google's most recent captcha is actually being human generated?
- 1023bytes 8y agoI think it's the other way around. Users solving the captcha are helping classify training data
- mtgx 8y agoI'm surprised that not everyone has figured this out. You're doing free labor for Google's Waymo. Why else would Google's re-captcha have all of the photos include cars, bridges, and traffic signs and lights?
- friedman23 8y ago>I'm surprised that not everyone has figured this out. has this just not been obvious from the start?
- threeseed 8y ago1. This really has been obvious since the start. 2. After Google acquired the Captcha service they initially used it for Google Maps where you was always asked to pick street numbers and store names. Only recently has it pivoted to Waymo use cases.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pentae 8y agoI just find the mental gymnastics fascinating that they are talking about how these people are living in abject poverty, and yet in the same article have the gall to highlight how people in the US are losing their jerbs. Which is it? Are we helping people in poor countries have a slightly better quality of life by working in an air conditioned office vs agriculture, or are we taking US jobs? It's one or the other.
- azernik 8y agoWhy can't it be both?
- zeroname 8y agoYou obviously can't save the jobs in one country and also create those same jobs in another country. The only way for both sides to profit (over the long run) is for either country to do the job it can do the most efficiently, i.e. comparative advantage. In practice, that's a real tough concept for people to come to terms with. People want to have their cake and eat it too.
- xvedejas 8y agoThere are enough non-zero-sum effects in economics that this isn't plainly apparent to me. It seems like quite a claim, really. For instance, I find it plausible that cheap labor from overseas may actually help subsidize the creation of an industry, which might grow enough to need more employees in the US for related work.
- cloakandswagger 8y agoIt's actually a pretty reasonable and logical claim, supported by 20 years of globalism that gutted American employment.
- Setepenre 8y agoWhat is this ? Rational thoughts on the internet.
- amrx431 8y agoClick bait article like these are the reasons that Trumps branding of prestigious media houses as "Fake news" found resonance among the masses. Kenyans are not being paid to program driverless cars but to label data. There is a Himalayan difference in skillsets required for programming driverless cars and labelling data. BBC should no better. But why would they care? They got me to to click the article and increase their visitor count.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sebow 8y agoFirst thing that comes to mind after reading the title (while also considering it's coming from BBC):Data labeling is programming nowadays, ok...
- kelvin0 8y agoThey are not 'programme'-ing anything. They are tagging images and labeling objects in those same images. They 'sweatshopped' the whole image tagging industry to 3rd world countries.
- dang 8y agoYes, that title was baity and misleading, so we've changed it to a more representative phrase from the article. A photo caption, actually; it's surprising how often those make better titles.
- joaomacp 8y agoWorking conditions aside, this is ironic: AI development would supposedly get rid of boring jobs, instead it's creating exactly that.
- r_singh 8y agoOff-topic, but does anyone have more info on the “call through encrypted line on Signal” bit at the bottom of the article. Seems like signal is catch up, I’m gonna get on it too.
- bitexploder 8y agoYou should definitely use Signal. It is usable and secure, rare things.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoI have no inside info, but presumably it's a call-out to potential journalistic sources. The call-out emphasizes secrecy to assuage fears of retaliation by third parties not happy to see the news spread. The reporters Edward Snowden reached out to almost missed out on the story because it seemed too much work to install and learn to use the secure communication tools Snowden asked for before saying what it was all about.
- Fricken 8y agoI think it's underappreciated just how much human labour goes into annotating data fro autonomous vehicles. Scale is a fast growing start-up, with 35 employees and around 10,000 contractors, many based out of India and Africa, who do data annotation for Cruise, Zoox, Lyft, and Nutonomy among others. https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/07/scale-whose-army-of-humans-annotate-raw-data-to-train-self-driving-and-other-ai-systems-nabs-18m/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/07/scale-whose-army-of-humans...
- threeseed 8y agoAlso the recent Maps story about Apple and how they might be using human labour to trace satellite imagery to identify the buildings. I also wonder how many companies are using Amazon Mechanical Turk to automate their processes.
- api 8y agoGiven that this training data basically gets loaded into neural nets, etc., can it be said that in some indirect sense these data labelers are actually driving these cars? Are we still just building the mechanical turk? To be it shows how far we still are from biological intelligent systems. I don't recall having to point out what an apple is to my daughter more than a few times. Watching children learn is breathtaking. Even much simpler brains like those of rodents or cats are far beyond anything built so far in silico.
- david-gpu 8y agoGenerally, neural networks do not memorize their training data. If they worked that way, they would not do well with samples they've never seen before. So no, I would not say that the labellers are driving the cars. They do play an important role in the process of building these systems, though.
- MaupitiBlue 8y agoSo these are the white collar knowledge jobs of the future?
- statguy 8y agoThese are the blue collar jobs.The white collar jobs are about designing the network architectures and training them.
- NightlyDev 8y ago"Brenda trains data used for artificial intelligence" I like how the writer always mentions that they are training the data used for AI, when they are in fact tagging data, not training anything...
- improbable22 8y agoThat's a curious slip, well spotted. I wonder if the caption-writer heard about "training data" and misunderstood that it's an adjective?