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Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor
- Chris2048 8y agoWhat could go wrong?
- paganel 8y agoLast week there were the poor women in India who were making a living out of labeling data, now it’s the inmates in Finland, I wonder who will be next? Will we have to boycott the likes of Google or FB for how the label their data the same way some people used to boycott clothes made in Bangladesh?
- radarsat1 8y ago> poor women in India who were making a living out of labeling data Is there something unethical about hiring people to label data? > now it’s the inmates in Finland Forced labour in general is always up for debate, but is there something about labeling data that is inherently worse than other forms of prison labour, such that tech companies deserve a boycott?
- gppk 8y agoI've spent weeks labelling data as part of my CV projects. It's much better than scraping graffiti off a wall...
- denzil_correa 8y ago> Is there something unethical about hiring people to label data? Inherently, no. The question I'd ask is - if labeled data is so important, would we pay them equitable benefits of the outcomes we achieve after the usage of this data? Or, do we simply fire them once they fuel our algorithms. It reminds me of "blood diamond" like practices.
- Nasrudith 8y agoThe funny thing is that it us the exact sort of "low tier - low skill effectiveness, high demand, high supply, low wages" job that aitomation was demonized for getting rid of they are facing complaints over making.
- gus_massa 8y agoScrews are also very important, I imagine millions and millions of IKEA furniture falling downs if screws disappear magically. More seriously, for some structures it's much better and easy to use screws than nails. (Nails are very important too.) Anyway, I don't imagine that the operators in a screw or nail factory are getting payed millions per year. There are hundred of economy books explaining how much you get paid, with different theories and interpretations, but if you can be replaced by a person that will do your work a minimal wage, you will probably get only a minimal wage. Also, each label of the data is not so valuable, some are wrong, some are unclear, you must aggregate and process millions of labels. Imagine how little value they do get for each Captcha reply. > Or, do we simply fire them once they fuel our algorithms. Most works are like this. Imagine you are the main architect/engineer in charge of building the Empire State Building. They pay you for a few year to do the plans of the building, hiring the workers, buying the materials, whatever is necessary to do. After the building if finished, they thank you and now you are unemployed. (The workers are unemployed too.) You don't get a cut of the profits of the building.
- lm28469 8y ago> I wonder who will be next? You do that every few days when you solve captchas.
- Chris2048 8y agoMy point was putting AI knowledge in the hands of people with a morally dubious history, but then I thought about tech executives and IT management, and maybe nothing's different..
- pjc50 8y agoAs I've been saying, the "AI threat" is not that it'll autonomously decide to hate humans but that it will, under the control and guidance of actual humans, be used for anti-human purposes.
- ataturk 8y agoAbsolutely. All technology is bent to the will of greedy, evil people eventually. Just look at what China has done with Western tech to cement political power and destroy opposition. China is already a dystopian living hell.
- an_ko 8y agoWhich part of this story is about that? I'm not seeing the connection. Are you worried that the inmates might be manipulating data?
- randon 8y agoi think he means that humans will abuse the ai (tech) and then use it for bad purpose
- thefounder 8y agoAnd what's new here? Any technology can be used both ways.
- randon 8y agoyes, no news, you can use ai for bad or good things, guns to save people from bad people or do bad things etc..
- thefounder 8y agoGuns are a bit different because they are designed to kill. I fail to see how you can save lives with machine guns unless you are in a war zone
- abledon 8y agoAnyone use VOTT for labelling training data? Man that is just a joy to use compared to labelImg, especially the template stamp feature and label hotkey.
- king_magic 8y agoI gave up on VOTT, ended up going with RectLabel on macOS. IMO better workflow, and being able to copy and paste annotations from one image to another (to then go fine tune them) blows both VOTT and labelImg our of the water.
- visarga 8y agoI checked VoTT and RectLabel and they seem to be desktop apps. Can they be used by a tagging team (more than one person), especially if some of the taggers work from home?
- king_magic 8y agoNot really, which is another big problem for all of them (including RectLabel). No great solutions all around :(
- torpilla 8y agoSkynet labor camps
- cm2187 8y agoOn the other hand, the prisoners can proudly write "Machine Learning" on their CV instead of having a gap!
- rishabhd 8y agoMy thoughts, exactly. Or even like The Matrix where humans are farmed for energy. Here, they are farmed for their mind to train the next AI, which might in a worst case scenario rule them someday. Somehow reminds me of this beautiful piece [1] by Maciej Cegłowski . [1] https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
- ben_w 8y agoI once found what looked like an early draft of The Matrix. Instead of body heat being used for power, part of each enslaved human’s brain was used as an organic supercomputer to control the fusion reactors.
- misnome 8y agoThe story goes that the studio executives wanted it changed to energy because they thought that viewers wouldn't understand using brains for computing power. Hard references to this fact are hard to find, though https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executive-meddling-the-cause-of-humans-as-batteries-in-the-matrix https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv... seems to collect a couple of secondary sources.
- benj111 8y agoIts getting so hard to spot the April Fools day stories. After reading, I'm guessing this isn't one of them.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 29ssyg 8y agoWhy should I be outraged at this? How is this much worse than any other prison job?
- randon 8y agoexactly, the only outrage is them being paid and not using that money to help the victims of their actions
- Nasrudith 8y agoPayment for labor is important on pragmatic grounds alone given incentives. If given only negative enforcement then it is do enough to avoid it and more paid overseers. If there is some positive enforcement then incentives align enough to not just "pretend to work whenever they can get away with it" as optimal. Not to mention the rehabilitative effects - you want convicts looking for delayed gratification and honest work instead of big scores.
- jpindar 8y agoAlso, giving prisoners privileges such as television or the chance to earn a little money makes it easier to prevent misbehavior by threatening to remove those privileges. This has been shown to be as effective (in most cases) as harsher punishment, but without making the prisoners as angry and resentful.
- renholder 8y ago>Exactly, the only outrage is them being paid... From the article: >...though the CSA is responsible for figuring out how much of that goes to the prisoners... Are you sure they're getting paid, right now? >...not using that money to help the victims... And, at what point, would this vengence form of justice stop? How much would be "adequate" for compensation to their victims? Are they still not penalised, even after they've "paid their debt to society"? ....because, last I recall hearing of the prison system in the United States, the punitive punishment doesn't really end - from being unable to vote to being unable to get a job because of a record to a number of other maliciously designed rules/laws intentionally meant/designed to further punish them, yeah?
- busfahrer 8y agoThis is a LitRPG novel waiting to happen
- jnty 8y agoGood intent from the labellers isn't always required for a good model but it certainly helps, especially if the model training process is unsophisticated. I'm sceptical enough of this being the case for poorly-paid annotators - surely for prisoners it could be even worse?
- lm28469 8y agoIf we trust for profit private prisons to fight wildfires I don't see why we wouldn't trust them for other things. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/california-is-paying-inmates-1-an-hour-to-fight-wildfires.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/california-is-paying-inmates...
- johnchristopher 8y agoBecause one has a fuckton of karma and social recognition and the other doesn't ?
- jMyles 8y agoWe don't trust for-profit private prisons. They're universally reviled.
- _jal 8y agoThere are different uses of the word 'trust'. Portions of the U.S. do, in fact, trust prisoners of for-profit institutions to fight fires. They have no choice in the matter. (A related definition of 'trusted' used in security is people who cannot be denied access to information.)
- bilbo0s 8y ago>They have no choice in the matter... ??? No dog in this fight really, but if they have no choice, can they really be said to trust? I mean, maybe through some kind of rhetorical gymnastics. Historically speaking, as soon as humans who lack choice actually get "choice", they tend to sprint right off the reservation as it were.
- viach 8y agoSo they'll get AI with criminal mindset as a result? See where it leads to?
- sharemywin 8y agoI saw the Robo-Cop movie.
- astrea 8y agoThey were classifying news articles. How could that possibly have a "criminal mindset"?
- mtw 8y agoI hope they're not asked to label if specific actions are morally correct or not :)
- tw1010 8y agoThat's a stereotyped characterization of why people go to prison that HN should be wise enough not to propagate.
- MrZongle2 8y agoUnconventional, but as a means to fill a "Mechanical Turk gap" it seems like a fine approach as the results can be isolated and tested. Inmates read and summarize with the benefit of being paid (and perhaps learning something in the process based upon the material read), Vainu gets a training set. That said, the headline just begs for a "Alexa, shank the snitch" kind of joke.