33 ms·

OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic

517 points by mkeeter 4y ago

bilsbie 4y ago
To be fair, I find the censorship makes it more toxic.
- alpos 4y ago
  I tend to agree with this notion. Instead of dealing with the fact that humans do and produce tons of awful shit, we just do our best to ignore it and pretend human nature is better than it is. This is delusion on a grand scale and it's hard to find examples in the historical record of good things ultimately coming from lots of people acting in the world while being divorced from reality.
  - ketzu 4y ago
    I find this notion rather unconvincing. To me, there is a huge difference between acknowloging that humans produce terrible stuff and training an AI to produce more of it. Humanity has improved thanks to our desire to go beyond the worst aspects of our nature instead of embracing it at every chance.
    - alpos 4y ago
      No one is suggesting we should embrace the worst. Only that ignoring it at every chance instead of ever properly dealing with it isn't the most helpful thing if we actually want to follow that desire to go beyond.
      - ketzu 4y ago
        Could you elaborate what you consider "properly dealing with it" in this context? They are definitely not ignoring it, as they take extra steps to make it not produce it. As they try to stop it from producing it, I assumed that critizing this filtering means someone wants the AI to produce those things.
        alpos 4y ago
        The context is probably what's throwing you off then. I took bilsbie's comment to be a context expansion here. Imagining how this general strategy of censoring what's actually out there plays out in the long run and wider context of how all of humanity deals or doesn't deal with what human minds are actually capable of producing. Also note that this wouldn't just be about a bot producing more bad stuff. ChatGPT also, or even mostly, answers questions and provides information. If bots like this do not even know about the filtered out content they cannot, for example, give an accurate or original answer to a question like: "Is nazi-ism on the rise?" The best they can do is regurgitate news posts, pundit commentary, and existing research articles. That might be good enough, but if a bot were able to see all the content out there it might even give a statistical summary of everything on the web and comment on the rate at which pro-nazi web articles are published compared to articles of all other types. That would be a useful way to shed some daylight on the issue. If most of our efforts most of the time are spent merely filtering out the trash, then we're still just ignoring pretty big issues. The strategy as applied here isn't exactly wrong for what OpenAI is trying to achieve but it still ends up being another example of people being more willing to spend a lot of resources pretending humans are better than they are than we are willing to spend a lot of resources fixing the underlying issues that make some people so screwed up to begin with. This new ml model they are building will be used to filter out child porn, among other things, from the output of ChatGPT, so users of that bot don't see it. It seems their ideal case is to reliably filter it from the input as well, so even the bot doesn't know about it. Which is fine for what they're doing, so they'll probably stop there. However, once you have something like a reliable detector for human misery and the warped human minds the produce it you're actually well on your way to developing a tool chain that could help authorities and mental health professionals identify and track down those warped mind as soon as or possibly before they cause harm. I'm not confident I know the whole field well enough to say no one is doing something like that but it does seem like the preferred option for most all AI teams is to spend $200k filtering out the problem rather than taking the time to build something that reduces or eliminates the root cause. And that stance is reasonable enough at the team/company levels because you'd have to do the former anyway even if you also do the latter. So of course it's not OpenAI's job to do that and this isn't a moralistic judgement on the teams building AI in general either. Humanity just isn't interested in solving those problems for real in the same way we are interested in a bot that can write code or tell us interesting stories. We want to know the police are on it in some capacity, but there's not likely to be enough investment in it to actually solve the problems any time soon. In the long run, being increasingly good at filtering this stuff out tends toward a future where most people can live their whole lives without ever becoming aware that these awful problems exist and possibly happen in their own cities. And if most people are never aware of a problem, it's not likely to ever get enough attention and funding to be solved. So that is the sense in which I can find agreement with bilsbie's notion that merely filtering out the bad stuff humans produce can be more toxic than letting people see what humans are really like. Though again, it's hard to blame any one team for just wanting to filter that stuff out. --- And there is actually at least one unrelated other way to look at bilsbie's comment so you might ask them what they meant as well. The other way I can think of is asking who decides what's acceptable content? And then expand the context on that to a hypothetical world where stuff like ChatGPT is ubiquitous. There are some obvious cases we'll all pretty universally call bad, so we don't mind someone training the bots to filter that out. However, there's other examples like a lot of horror books/films or even mystery/detective novels and such that push the boundaries in order to get people to think, if those get caught in the filters too, then we're doing humanity a disservice by effectively banning/digitally-burning books/articles/web-sites. And let's not forget, if people are good at building such filter systems for all the bots you can bet governments with a eye for controlling thought will be interested in installing some filters of their own.
rcdwealth 4y ago
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doubtingbobmas 4y ago
I find this kind of hard to believe. Having Africans remove "toxic" content is absurd, because Africans tend to be incredibly misogynistic and homophobic with an incredible amount of hatred and vitriol towards "the west" (and now Ukraine). Right now, go onto Facebook, search for Ukraine and open the first 10 posts. You will see that at least 70% of all comments are racist and from Africans. Now search for "gay murder" and you will find that 90% of the comments are from Africans agreeing with the murder and blaming the gay victim. Now do the same search for "priest beheaded" .. then "priest burned". Having Kenyans train ChatGPT surely means they brought their religious and homophobic biases. This dataset must be garbage.
LisaDziuba 4y ago
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SidiBlak 4y ago
I've been living in Kenya for the last 7 years. ChatGPT is exploiting workers. Yes many live in poverty, especially in Nairobi, but one 'good' meal on the side of the road is about $1. To put it in better perspective 1 dozen eggs cost $1.80. Even in slums there is a cost for living in something barely more than a shanty house, without running water and/or proper toilets. My vote is ChatGPT is being exploitative, what they are paying should be an hourly rate. They are taking time from people with education and who speak at least two languages. Just because you can pay people less, does not mean you should.
volodarik_lemon 4y ago
well, if local workers are ready to work for just terms and it's legal...
Ombudsman 4y ago
To put it in perspective, the average income in Kenya is around $1.25 an hour and tbh (as a Kenyan) I really can't see it as a bad thing. A lot of people here live in abject poverty, they live in situations you can't really begin to imagine. So any sort of help coming our way is good.
- vit05 4y ago
  This salary is higher than the minimum in Brazil. Of course, without labor rights. They would probably also get thousands of employees in Brazil if they needed to, as well as in several other countries. I myself do work with mediation of content for several social networks, getting a little more than that. The only problem is that the monthly hours are irregular, there are very few hours. If someone has an offer of 4 dollars an hour for 200 hours a week without any benefits, I accept it immediately. And that's half the US salary, as I understand it.
- CatWChainsaw 4y ago
  Hope it pays for the therapy they'll need.
- argc 4y ago
  Yeah it seems like it would only be worth mentioning if its less than the local livable/minimum wage or the employees were mistreated.
- csomar 4y ago
  I don't think your comment makes it any better. With all respect but given the HDI of Kenya, I don't think your average Kenyan worker is that versed in English, has a laptop and an Internet connection. $2/hour for a company like OpenAI (which can, most likely, afford more) is pure modern slavery.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    It used to be called globalization
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
ykovalenko 4y ago
[flagged]
- ryanwaggoner 4y ago
  What else was widely hailed in 2022 as an impressive technological innovation? ChatGPT was being talked about in my non-eng circles, which is unusual.
  - affgrff2 4y ago
    Diffusion models?
  - howling 4y ago
    nuclear fusion reaction with net energy gain?
    - faeyanpiraat 4y ago
      It was nowhere near net gain.
    - arbitrage 4y ago
      net energy gain if you ignore the overwhelming net energy loss, sure.
- belltaco 4y ago
  Just curious about what people think were 2022's top tech innovations, can you list them.
  - choeger 4y ago
    I would bet at least one of them involves dropping explosives on Russian soldiers.
- avindroth 4y ago
  It pretty much was.
amelius 4y ago
Meanwhile, your shirt and pants were made by Indian children working for less than $2 per hour.
- rchaud 4y ago
  [flagged]
- key_stroker 4y ago
  If only, we wear what you wore last year and threw away, I'd say 95% of all clothes sold in Kenya are used.
  - HanClinto 4y ago
    I don't think the GP is speaking to Kenyans wearing Indian-manufactured clothes -- I think that they're pointing out the hypocrisy in Time readers (and its authors) who live in highly-developed countries, wearing clothing made by low-wage workers, who are just looking for any reason to criticize OpenAI, without applying that same criticism to themselves.
    - yunwal 4y ago
      Ah yeah, the classic “in order to criticize a thing, you must first criticize and root out every possible worse thing.” People have no way of knowing where the things they buy come from or how to source things ethically unless people write articles like this and push for higher standards when they see an opportunity. It’s one thing to protect genuinely well-meaning people who can’t meet a purity standard, but OpenAI has a track record of dishonesty (starting with their name).
      - factsarelolz 4y ago
        > People have no way of knowing where the things they buy come from I don't know about other places and maybe I'm an outlier but I check everything for where it's produced / manufactured. Most if not all items in the US are required to have where the item was produced/manufactured. Some may say "Manufactured in the US with globally sourced material" makes it harder to pin down where each of the components originated from. Clothes and other items the country of origin is on the tag.
yasp 4y ago
[flagged]
karmasimida 4y ago
So? This is good salary locally I believe.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Extend this logic to remote work and your salary should scale strictly with where you're living. Living in Ohio but working for a bay area startup? Expect to get paid a "good salary locally". Why not, right?
  - sidlls 4y ago
    That is the case in the vast majority of tech companies, though. They (almost) all have something like a "regional adjustment", "location based" or other classification for salaries in different areas. Some are more extreme than others. The company I work for (it's a relatively well-known tech company) certainly has it, and I know Google and other FAANGs do, too.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    That's how it works. An engineer in the Bay Area can easily get 10 interviews next week and has to be paid more to stay.
  - dekhn 4y ago
    yes, that makes sense. there should be regional cost of living adjustments.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
    Point is that when you interview in SF and then leverage remote work to go wherever you want they cannot police where you are and determine the appropriate salary. OpenAI went shopping for Kenyan labor and those who did the job were not American and never interviewed in SF
  - joshlemer 4y ago
    This is more or less how it works, yes.
  - 4y ago
iso1631 4y ago
Looks like the median salary in Kenya is about $3.50 an hour ($7k/year)
brookst 4y ago
Headline implies there’s something negative here, but I’m not seeing it. Was OpenAI supposed to hire high-skill workers in developed countries to do this work?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  It's just the dichotomy of using $2/hour labor to build a product that makes you obscenely wealthy. As another poster said- in Kenya a job is a job and they still paid above average. Money going to Kenya is a good thing. They are doing the work so it must be worth it.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    This also seems like a much better service job than the horrible scarring moderation jobs at facebook or factory work for apple. Heck maybe even better than most Amazon US jobs at the warehouses
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      Well, maybe not quite: > Almost more interesting in that article I found that Sama, the Kenyan company, was also asked to collect CP and brutal/gore images for OpenAI. After delivering 1400 images, Sama cancelled the contract as this was even too much for them. OpenAI then talked about "miscommunication" and they actually did not really want those CP images. Well, they made its own category for it and asked Sama to collect images of several other categories, but somehow it was lost in communication that for one of theses categories, no images should be collected. Because they are illegal. OpenAI swears they never opened the images they received (and paid for). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427118
  - truculent 4y ago
    "I think maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism."
  - gowld 4y ago
mcast 4y ago
I wonder how much this would have costed if they used mechanical Turk instead.
- tiffanyh 4y ago
  Given Microsoft invested $1B & incentivized use of Azure, I wouldn't be surprised if they are prohibited from using other clouds (i.e., AWS). But I too wonder what the cost would be as a comparison.
  - mcast 4y ago
    That makes sense, but I wonder if MTurk is still useful today with the advances in AI, I haven't heard much about it in the last few years.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
I don't have a strong opinion on this myself, but I am curious how the general sentiment of "that's a good wage for Kenya and this is fine" might change if they were hiring developers there instead.
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  Wouldn't change at all for me. If quality developers could be hired for $2 per hour, that would be fantastic. Imagine how much progress we could make. The first thing I would do is hire a bunch of people to fix the bugs in my favorite open source software. In the short term it might make my life harder as I would probably lose my high paying development job. But that's absolutely not a good reason to oppose progress.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  That's how it's working, many companies have developers in low-cost areas, and they definitely aren't paying them USA-level salaries, often not even USA-minimum wage. Developer salaries even in such countries tend to be far better than $2/h, but that's explicitly because western companies like these "were hiring developers there instead", if they weren't, the developer salaries there would match the local market and be even lower.
- alpos 4y ago
  So long as developers want to be paid by the hour rather than paid for a specific result, I would say this is fine too. The problem everyone is waffling on here isn't the competitiveness of the wage, it's the gap between the value of what the labor produces and the value offered to produce it. But you can't escape that gap so long as you're fundamentally trading time for money. If you want to capture more of the value of your work, you become a contractor and bid firm-fixed or cost-plus contracts instead of labor-hour or time-and-materials. If you want to capture even more value than that, you work on building business systems and selling a valuable product or service rather than spending your work hours doing the tasks themselves. Whether you're in Kenya or the US and whether you're doing undesirable or highly desirable work, it is not a moral failing of the business you are working for that they did not also take the time to ensure that you could have become a contractor if you wanted to or that they did not ensure that your economic situation allows sufficient market opportunities for you to quit and form a business if you wanted to.
phphphphp 4y ago
> [...] OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya was Sama, a San Francisco-based firm that employs workers in Kenya [...] Does this qualify as nominative determinism, given OpenAI founder Sam Altman's username is... sama?
0xblood 4y ago
Almost more interesting in that article I found that Sama, the Kenyan company, was also asked to collect CP and brutal/gore images for OpenAI. After delivering 1400 images, Sama cancelled the contract as this was even too much for them. OpenAI then talked about "miscommunication" and they actually did not really want those CP images. Well, they made its own category for it and asked Sama to collect images of several other categories, but somehow it was lost in communication that for one of theses categories, no images should be collected. Because they are illegal. OpenAI swears they never opened the images they received (and paid for).
- ianhawes 4y ago
  Directing someone to commit a crime is still a crime. OpenAI most likely has criminal liability in this instance and the FBI should open an investigation if they haven't already.
  - gowld 4y ago
    Criminal liability for someone misunderstanding a request and doing what they were not asked to do? Where did you earn your law degree?
    - xdavidliu 4y ago
      You have it backwards; OpenAI was the one that made the request. OpenAI claimed that the Kenyan company misunderstood the request. Your parent comment is claiming that OpenAI is criminally liable for making the request.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - bluena 4y ago
    Crime is not the appropriate word but there's clearly a well documented history of abusing conditions toward data labeling workers [1] [2] [3] For those looking for an AI data labeling service also tries to help workers along the way, here's a plug to the company I started "dataprep.be" [4] We have a small preference for working workers with special needs (deaf, mute and employees with small handicaps). Public subsidies for these type of workers help our case in the EU as well as contraints for some public institutions in the EU to hire more handicap workers. With clients more sensitive to costs, we also work with remote data labelers from developing countries. We help putting checks in place to limit forced and child labor. We pay 5% extra so they have time to learn high demand tech skills. (Using Khan Academy and free access to a normally 250$/year Datacamp subscription) Happy to work with the HN crowd or just receive feedback and mentoring! (My email is in my profile) [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/88apnv/underpaid-workers-are-being-forced-to-train-biased-ai-on-mechanical-turk https://www.vice.com/en/article/88apnv/underpaid-workers-are... [2] https://gizmodo.com/horror-stories-from-inside-amazons-mechanical-turk-1840878041 https://gizmodo.com/horror-stories-from-inside-amazons-mecha... [3] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/behind-tiktoks-boom-a-legion-of-traumatised-10-a-day-content-moderators https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/beh... [4] https://www.dataprep.be https://www.dataprep.be
nomdep 4y ago
I’m surprised no one here is challenging the assumption that ChatGPT needs to be “less toxic”.
- sunrise54 4y ago
  Exactly. Also, what constitutes "toxic" and shouldn't AI output be "toxic" if the user intentionally requests it?
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    The answer to the second half of the question appears to be "no" at least if tech companies have any say on the matter. At some point they collectively decided that users are children who have no agency and must be paternalistically protected from the wrong words appearing on the screen.
- danuker 4y ago
  I'd pay into a crowdfund to train a low-memory language model that can swear. Bonus points if you call it GPTCarlin. But I see why "serious business" investors will want to avoid anything controversial. It is their business to suck life out of everything.
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    You can tell that ChatGPT has been neutered in being rendered so safe. It basically will refuse to disagree with you, even if you get crazy and wrong. That makes it vulnerable to disruption.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Given how, for some topics—especially about itself or AI generally—ChatGPT seems to really get stuck in a rut, I suspect there's a lot of manually-written processing and categorization and massaging that's happening before (and, probably, after) the AI-proper gets ahold of prompts. I further suspect they audit responses to find topics where it comes up with shitty ones, and then fix those with the same kind of manual process. I'd love to know how much of its seeming smart is because it's just that good and how much is because humans directly intervene, on some level, in how it responds. Is it that much better than other efforts, purely from machine learning, or has it just had tons and tons more human hours put into tweaking it than others have? How much of it's "real" AI and how much is good ol' hand-written decision trees?
pelasaco 4y ago
Toxic article from Time about ChatGPT using Kenyan Workers to make ChatGPT less toxic. We went full circle here.
etc-hosts 4y ago
The company OpenAI used to manage workers in Kenya, Sama, has come up before https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-employee-treatment/ https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-...
chx 4y ago
When are we going to learn? Uber did Greyball and nothing happened. Its corporate charter should've been revoked and the executives jailed. A very clear message has been sent to the tech companies by this: do whatever you want, the law doesn't apply to you. OpenAI did this and nothing happened. At the next pandemic, some sort of this generative AI will be used to write the anti scientific articles and woe upon to you then. This time it was bad but that will be a thousand times worse. Can't find who said OpenAI basically released a zero day on human cognition without a patch. Outlaw it already until we find one. This is no joke here.
- zackees 4y ago
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- tqi 4y ago
  What law are you claiming OpenAI has broken?
  - chx 4y ago
    If there isn't one then make one. It is a danger to society and I am not kidding.
    - tqi 4y ago
      What is the danger?
      - chx 4y ago
        This pandemic a few hundreds of thousands have died in the USA alone because a few, very few people decided to pander anti scientific views. Which found a very fertile ground thanks to the relentless work of conservative pundits in the last few decades destroying the credibility of media. Check Charlie Stykes' How the Right Lost Its Mind -- and note he blames himself as well, rightfully so. The next pandemic when these articles will be written by these AI will be a lot worse. You can write a thousand very scientific sounding papers in seconds. Even right now to appease these morons the world has largely dropped masking mandates and that kills and disables people. There is no scientific reason not to mask and every reason to do it but it's politically not expedient. Check https://jessicawildfire.substack.com/p/heres-150-sources-on-covid-to-share https://jessicawildfire.substack.com/p/heres-150-sources-on-... So the danger is the death of millions in the next pandemic. And that's just what immediately comes to mind as the biggest, most concrete danger. Other dangers include the almost immediate obliteration of independent artists -- there's a lawsuit now, good but it won't be able to do much, even a few hundred millions in damages is just cost of doing business to these folks. So many possibilities... https://mobile.twitter.com/Dereklowe/status/1599035870308618241 https://mobile.twitter.com/Dereklowe/status/1599035870308618...
1659447091 4y ago
Maybe I need more coffee, but wouldn't it be easier to not add text from certain parts of the internet, or make scrapping bots with controls to avoid those areas? I understand it would still grab some unwanted things, but it seems it would be much easier to deal with. Unless of course, this is basically the entirety of the internet and I just refuse to see it as such. There is a section that mentioned "An online search for the text reveals that it originated from an online erotica site". If you dont want sexually explicit text, then maybe dont include text from literary erotica sites in the first place? Or is it like advertising where companies keep passing around the same chunk of data and continue adding to it? Still, I would think making or paying for better(smarter) scrapping bots would be cheaper.
- falcolas 4y ago
  I, at this point in time, don't believe any vetting of the training materials was done, because they needed too much of it to make their ML model work. They didn't check for licenses. They didn't check for content. They didn't check for correctness. At this point, it's cheaper for them to manually alter the output than it is to retrain on a more appropriate data set.
kryz 4y ago
I suspect this may not have gone down the way the article is reporting. OpenAi paid Sama $12/hr for the work and they in turn paid their employees $2/hr. Yet because workers were reportedly affected by the content Sama cancelled the contract? I think we all know they would just replace the $2/hr workers. It doesn’t check out
- richrichardsson 4y ago
  > OpenAi paid Sama $12/hr for the work and they in turn paid their employees $2/hr. This kind of shit really boils my piss. I did extra work on the Alexander movie in Morocco. There was a pay disparity between what the local production company were paying Westerners vs what they paid locals [1]. I'm almost 100% sure the production company paying the local company would have been paying the same price for both. [1] - this isn't even the half of what was wrong with the situation; they were filming during Ramadan, so the locals couldn't eat/drink/smoke anything during the daylight hours and made to stand around in the blazing sun. One old lady fainted. The production company asked the Westerners to please try and keep out of sight whilst drinking/eating/smoking between takes, but then at the same time telling us we can't move from our spots lest we break continuity. Towards the end of filming it almost turned into a riot due to the bad treatment of the locals. Total joke.
- factsarelolz 4y ago
  Not sure why this isn't the top comment. Sama could have provided the mental health support that employees may have needed with the 10$/hr per employee profit they were making. Sama didn't and decided that instead of losing profit by providing their employees with mental healthcare they canceled the contract. Smells fishy.
- notahacker 4y ago
  That's effectively answered a paragraph down. Sama cancelled the contract after being asked by OpenAI to collect material that was illegal under US law, at a time when a negative story about work they were doing for Facebook meant that journalists were interested in interviewing their [ex]employees That's sufficiently risky for a company to be prepared to fire a high profile client, and whilst their margins were huge the value of the actual project was only $200k, which isn't going to seem like riches to Sama's California-based management team.
xiphias2 4y ago
The terrible situation in Kenya (and all other poor countries) is created by the predatory loans provided by IMF (and the countries that copy those types of loans). It's unproductive to talk about the hundreds of billions of dollars of slavery work that companies do until we have an answer for the trillions of dollars of toxic debt created by these huge organizations.
- factsarelolz 4y ago
  > (and the countries that copy those types of loans). What are the other countries? I know China is doling out these loans apart of their belt road initiative but I'm not up to speed on other countries hamstringing countries with unneeded infrastructure and billions in loans.
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    China is of course the best in copying the west, but I don't know much details. Alex Gladstein is writing a new book about this huge problem, as the latest good books about it he found were in the 70s.
- finikytou 4y ago
  like IMF hindered korea?
- boeingUH60 4y ago
  No, the terrible situation is created by gross corruption, mismanagement, and unbelievable incompetence in those countries. I live in a similar country (Nigeria)…We Africans are the source of our own problems because we choose not to utilize our resources well and plunder the few we extract, not some boogeyman IMF that also gave loans to some countries that are prosperous today.
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    The usual setup is that an extremely corrupt goverment leader takes out a loan that gives enough money for him to be reelected and put a bit away for himself. In return he increases income taxes, devalues the money and sets up the country for exporting luxury goods that are needed for 1st world countries (but local people would have no chance of buying) why destroying their own agriculture, so that they have to import inferior mass manufactured products from rich countries. On the long term the countries have to give back 10-20 times the original loan that is gone in a few years. Does any of this sound familiar to you?
mynameishere 4y ago
Two dollar an hour censors. I miss the days when the pope would personally review scientists' correspondence.
zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago
I find the following paragraph to be quite funny. "To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest."
stavros 4y ago
Please note the cognitive dissonance if you believe both that this is wrong and that remote workers' pay should be adjusted based on their location.
cabyn 4y ago
Sad to see the viewpoints of so many people framing this as "helping Kenya" or "They took the job, so it's worth it to them". I can assure you OpenAI did not have a charity meeting and say, "what poor, impoverished country can we lift up today?" It was "What country has limited labor laws, no unions, no red tape, and the cheapest labor we can find?" 99.99% of corporations put profit above people. That's why we still "benefit" from child labor and sweatshops, because we prefer cheap crap and money over the betterment of humanity. The same arguments given here were also given by coal miners in 1840's Europe[1],[2] when employing women and children, along the lines of "oh the children love it, they even get to see horses!" (and indeed, the children did show up to work every day, so why make a fuss?) [1]https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?PageId=Detail&DocId=100908&PageNo=2 https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?Page... [2]https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1842/jun/07/employment-of-women-and-children-in https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1842/jun/...
- 99_00 4y ago
  Both these things can be true at the same time OpenAI hired Kenyans because of limited labour law, no unions, no red tape, and the cheapest they can find. Getting these jobs is good for Kenya
  - blagie 4y ago
    I would suspect that's only approximately true. OpenAI hired them because Kenya has hundreds of thousands of people who are fluent in English, but without the level of basic education or employability needed to earn more than $2/day. For simple outsourcing tasks like this one, outsourcing to Kenya is a win-win. You can drastically reduce costs, while significantly improving people's lives. That'd be true regardless of labor laws, unions, or otherwise. The legal system in Kenya isn't quiet as wonderful for business as you describe; it inherits British colonial bureaucracy, has some corruption, isn't all that laissez-faire, and can be a minor pain in the butt. Unions, likewise, would increase income, but not by enough to make this a bad deal. Kenya is competing with India and the Philippians here, not with low-cost US labor.
  - 4y ago
nzoschke 4y ago
AI has always prompted ethical discussions but now that big ones are publicly available we society needs to speed run actually implementing major new ethical decisions. Yes ChatGPT needs to be “not toxic”. The company leadership believes this and is investing heavily researching and designing and implementing as many safe guards as possible. They know if they don’t do a good job here it will be a PR and support disaster and ultimate effect the bottom line. No serious customers will buy any AI product if there’s a chance it spews sex, hate speech or violence, etc. to their end users. At least for now, some humans somewhere in the chain will have to review toxic content to help train. It sounds particularly depressing to me that a $50B company can outsource this to Kenya for $200k. But I don’t know who else or how much money would make it better. Totally hypothetical but I bet some of the handsomely paid US engineers have a ton of policies in place to eliminate exposure to toxic content. But also when they do see some they have a much better foundation in life for it not triggering major mental health problems. What we really need to know is what OpenAIs whole portfolio of approaches, budgets, staff and outsourcing looks like. In the meantime kudos to Time for exposing one piece for public discourse.
- sunrise54 4y ago
  > What we really need to know is what OpenAIs whole portfolio of approaches, budgets, staff and outsourcing looks like. In other words, you want OpenAI to be...open? :)
trabant00 4y ago
Why didn't they ask the "AI" itself to filter the results? Isn't AI going to offer medical and legal advice soon? How will it do such things when it can't tell what is child abuse? Rhetorical question, at least for me.
dzonga 4y ago
people who are complaining about the wage being too low relative to western wages are 1. thinking in words instead of things 2. not looking at the alternative which is would kenyan's themselves be rather paid $2 or get nothing at all i'm african not kenyan and i'm glad these job opportunities exist. the headline is fake outrage from sjw westerners drinking lattes that cost 5 quid / 7 bucks
SwetDrems 4y ago
I feel like comments here are too focused on the $2 per hour aspect and not enough on the emotional abuse that this labour entails. Sure, maybe it's an "average wage", but the people performing this work are suffering mental trauma because for hours upon hours they are subjected to reading stories and viewing images of sexual abuse, assault, gore. The people performing this sort of extremely difficult emotional labour should be taken care of. It is disgusting for OpenAI to pay so little and at the same time have such little respect for humanity and decency.
- hnarn 4y ago
  What part of moderating ChatGPT involves looking at images?
  - SwetDrems 4y ago
    Of course images are not relevant to ChatGPT (I never specified ChatGPT), but to other models being trained by OpenAI. From the article: "That month, Sama began pilot work for a separate project for OpenAI: collecting sexual and violent images—some of them illegal under U.S. law—to deliver to OpenAI."
- alpos 4y ago
  It's worth noting that OpenAI actually paid around six times that amount for this work. It's also worth noting that Sama actually did provide for their employee's mental health. They didn't do a good job of it but trying and failing at a thing doesn't quite qualify at the level of disgust imo. Especially not for the company that was outsourcing this. It's also worth noting that even if those of us in the peanut gallery would not trust the word of either OpenAI or Sama, it is not unreasonable for OpenAI's team to have trusted that Sama was doing what they said they were with regard to providing for their own employees mental health.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
Tech journos having to scrape the bottom of the barrel for the Silicon Valley outrage du jour.
erenyeager 4y ago
People supporting this have a similar mentality to Arabian Gulf countries that treat laborers poorly: “we pay you so that makes us generous, shut up”. Of course, this behavior is unacceptable and needs to be condemned. Imo Using people’s conditions in poverty as a way to severely exploit them is like pimping out a starving child and wanting credit for sharing some of the earnings. There is nobody to protect the child and he’s desperate, but that doesn’t make the pimp correct.
- tofuahdude 4y ago
  Rising supply of jobs increases wages and quality of life. This is a good thing. The wages they're paying are substantially higher than all the local averages. This is a good thing. How is this "severely exploiting"? The alternative is that the Kenyan economy remain isolated, small, and impoverished. This is a bad thing.
  - fzeroracer 4y ago
    You're using the exact same logic as those that were using child labour for coal mining in the 1800s. They're being specifically exploited because that is what the company set out to do. You could argue any number of benefits as a smokescreen but the reality is that they hired people in Kenya because they knew they could exploit them. Everything else is post-hoc rationalization.
    - tofuahdude 4y ago
      Except that nowhere did I advocate for child labor. That is obviously abhorrent and clear false equivalence. Are the employees adults? Yes. Are they being forced to work there? No. Are they choosing / trying to work there because the pay is higher than their alternatives? Yes. Very different than child labor.
- abigail95 4y ago
  How many Kenyans do you employ? More than the few hundred you're trying to get fired? How does that improve their situation?
bannedbybros 4y ago
[dead]
endlessvoid94 4y ago
Awful journalism
bilsbie 4y ago
So whatever harm the Kenyans have saved us from, doesn’t that cancel out by exposing them to it?
- alpos 4y ago
  That's not proportional, by design even. The whole game here is to do a small amount of work and multiply the gains by an infinite number of results from people using the bot. That's always the game with any kind of technology. So no, having a few people experience something bad so billions can avoid experiencing anything bad ever does not cancel out.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
At least Kenyan workers get $2 an hour ... I haven't seen a single penny for the hours of my life spent on recaptchas.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > I haven't seen a single penny for the hours of my life spent on recaptchas. If you value the services pritected by recaptcha at less than a penny, why do you do the recaptchas at all?
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
    >> If you value the services pritected by recaptcha at less than a penny Kindly point where I wrote that.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      >> If you value the services pritected by recaptcha at less than a penny > Kindly point where I wrote that. “At least Kenyan workers get $2 an hour … I haven’t seen a single penny for the hours of my life spent on recaptchas.” [0] Payment in kind is payment. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429092
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
        You mean recaptcha is payment for services? Of course not, they don't get any money from g$$gle. In fact, site loses money if I fail to access it due to recaptcha.
cactusplant7374 4y ago
Do projects like this still exist? The overhead to develop an AI that doesn't actually understand anything must be quite high at this point.
aorth 4y ago
2 USD is currently ~248 KES, which is actually a reasonable wage for unskilled labor in Kenya. If you can do this work for eight hours a day, for roughly twenty days a month, then you're making ~40,000 KES per month. That's a very good salary for a huge portion of the population in Kenya. Source: living and working in Kenya since 2007.
- Balgair 4y ago
  Hey! Anything else you can share with us about the Kenyan tech/start-up scene? How's the rocketry business there?
advisedwang 4y ago
Forget pay, I'm more interested in the quality of the training data this produces. If you have Kenyans rating what constitutes hate speech or obscenity, you are going to end up with an AI that reflects Kenyan mores. If you pay peanuts, you're going to get low-effort evaluations that miss subtly. Even with a handbook and instructions, this is unavoidable to a certain degree.
kderbyma 4y ago
Just going to say it....These companies are run by criminals....all of them are always connected to crime. it's a fact. not an opinion. OpenAI has blood money. It's blood diamonds but information.....same thing....just modernized and remote....
h1fra 4y ago
So much comments saying it's good for kenyans while most of us would not review gore and toxic content all day long for our own local minimum wage. This is clear abuse of cheap labor, and also a good way to not provide psychological support that would be required in our own country.
gr4yb34rd 4y ago
Wages in San Francisco are way higher than Alabama, too.
lazyeye 4y ago
To all the likely incredibly highly paid people here (by world standards) commenting on the poor Kenyan wages. Rather than having vacuous, facile discussions on social media that achieve absolutely nothing other than signal how virtuous you are, why dont you donate a significant chunk of your wages to an African charity?
- vore 4y ago
  How does a vacuous, facile suggestion like donating a significant chunk of my wages to some African charity stop companies like Sama from taking OpenAI's $12.50/hr and paying out $2/hr and pocketing the change?
  - lazyeye 4y ago
    Well it does nothing of course. Nothing at all. Just like all the useless moral posturing on here (you know, as long as there is no personal cost involved beyond expressing an opinion).
georgeg 4y ago
Am Kenyan in Tech/science. For the nature and the volume of work, the wages sighted here are grossly low. In addition, it appears that Sama was paid in US dollars and negotiated a great contract with OpenAI only to then exploit Kenyans and legally hind under the umbrella of low wages. Shame shame shame. This is so distressing " ... All of the four employees interviewed by TIME described being mentally scarred by the work. Although they were entitled to attend sessions with “wellness” counselors, all four said these sessions were unhelpful and rare due to high demands to be more productive at work...."
renewiltord 4y ago
Selfish bleeding hearts are such an annoyance. They never give you good jobs. They always take away the jobs you can get. This makes sense, though. If you work for cheap for someone who is willing to pay you, both of you are happy. The person who is unhappy is a third party who you are harming by preventing him from charging more. So that guy will invent justifications: no job should pay this little, they don't know better, etc etc But from the fact that these people never get you a better job and always take away a good job, you can tell what they want: to stop you from outcompeting them. Place it in obvious terms like that and it's clear who is trying to harm you and who is a feasible partner.
Imnimo 4y ago
It can both be true that the wage is pretty decent for Kenya, and also that OpenAI should have paid more.
bilater 4y ago
Alternative headline: OpenAI hired workers and paid them money to help with RLHF training for their GPT-3.5 model.
taylorius 4y ago
Bear in mind Time magazine is presumably not the greatest fan of large language models, since they'll be churning out Time magazine articles by the 100s, given another year of development.
croddin 4y ago
It’s funny that @sama’s company is working with a company named Sama. It also confused me when reading some of the comments at first.
QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
A Kenyan working 40 hours a week for two dollars an hour is making twice the GDP per capita. A US citizen working 40 hours a week for US minimum wage is making 1/5 of the GDP per capita
altairprime 4y ago
Could they afford to pay US minimum wage to workers, and they’re merely pocketing the difference? Or are they wholly unable to afford US minimum wages and are papering over that inability through Kenyan labor?
churchill 4y ago
I see so many comments from self-anointed do-gooders that I just have to explain something from my lived experience. I'm Nigerian. I graduated high school at 15 and because my family didn't have the funds for uni, I got a job in what was essentially a sweatshop factory with extra steps. I got paid 12k Naira ($16) per month. After all, I had was a secondary school education and I couldn't bargain for better. Roughly one year later, I got a job writing for a content mill where I was paid $1 for 100 words. I can't describe my happiness when I got my first $50 for 5,000 words. All earned while sitting at a desk, typing away on a broken laptop, using unreliable internet. To a social justice warrior in SF or NY, it might have been exploitation, but to me an African teenager with no relevant experience or higher education, it was the first step I needed to pull myself up by my bootstraps. I levered up and today, I make the same or a bit more than quite a few freelance writers in the West. Point is, it's okay to feel bad for these Africans; but if you really do, you will support free trade - that's the most successful instrument for lifting humans out of poverty. Without this "starvation-level" gig like some of you may call it, these workers would settle for something less. Today, Nigeria's minimum wage is around 30k Naira, yet many Nigerians don't even make that much. On the other hand, a worker making $2 per hour 8 hours 5 days will net $80 per week or 59k Naira at the current market rates. If you complain someone is exploiting me, please give me a better job - or let me take my least worst option.
- zht 4y ago
  what about criticisms from fellow Kenyans who say that it is exploitation?
  - churchill 4y ago
    Are their opinions more valid than that of the Kenyans that took these jobs? The government can mandate a "fair" wage, but the government never employs everyone at that rate. These "exploiters" are actually giving Africans money for their labor - I think I'm more on the side of those who pay money for an African's labor vs. those that stand on the sidelines and try to determine what is fair.
- churchill 4y ago
forinti 4y ago
~US$2 is the minimum wage in Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Chile, and a few others.
lordfrito 4y ago
Talk about a story with a political agenda. Just seems like a plain old political outrage clickbait article with the words ChatGPT bolted in to make it topical. The kind which I've apparently developed a new dismissive reflex towards.
thunkshift1 4y ago
This has got to be the most dumbass news article related to chatgpt I have come across
skrbjc 4y ago
"The contracts stated that OpenAI would pay an hourly rate of $12.50 to Sama for the work, which was between six and nine times the amount Sama employees on the project were taking home per hour." OpenAI paid $12 an hour, it's Sama that paid them $2 an hour. People should be upset at Sama, not OpenAI. I'm sure you could find Americans willing to label data for $12 an hour. From OpenAI's perspective, they likely thought they were doing good by going with Sama, since Sama's mission is to provide work to people in Africa. From their website: "Since our founding, we’ve pioneered new technologies and business methods that harness the power of markets for social good, meaningfully improving employment and income outcomes for those with the greatest barriers to formal work." This is a story about Sama exploiting cheap labor in Africa, if that's what you want to call it, rather than OpenAI specifically aiming to do that.
- eliasdaler 4y ago
  Ah yes, "Don't blame company, blame the contractors". That's exactly why companies use contractors more and more - plausible deniability. Same with CEOs hiding behind many layers of hierarchy so that they can always say "Well, it wasn't ME who made the decision".
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  Now that is an absurd overhead. 500%?! Gross
- choppaface 4y ago
  Do we know how many workers were also enrolled into WorldCoin? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-16/worldcoin-the-eyeball-scanning-crypto-unicorn-hits-signup-snags https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-16/worldcoin...
- MarcoZavala 4y ago
  [dead]
- DuckFeathers 4y ago
  Now, do revenue/salary for ALL companies in the US.
nojvek 4y ago
I grew up in Kenya. Low level work pays about 10,000 Ksh for cleaners, construction/warehouse workers e.t.c That's ~$80 USD/month. At 160hrs/month, that is $0.5/hr. Not ideal, but $2/hr is an upgrade for many.
aaron695 4y ago
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Alifatisk 4y ago
Can’t we rename OpenAI to ClosedAI?
btbuildem 4y ago
Everyone is focusing on the salary, but have you read the article? It's legitimately problematic that there is a dark, vile essence of this being abstracted away -- the shiny, attractive, safe-for-advertisers front, vs the violent and disgusting "back end" with manual labourers sifting through the muck. It feels like it's a consequence of indiscriminate ingestion of datasets. Like, did OpenAI really have to point their data hoovers at 4chan?
agilob 4y ago
Don't worry about the $2 because later on they used everyone else for free to see if we can trick ChatGPT into sudo mode, describing how to produce methamphetamine, or producing increasingly racist jokes.
throwaway14356 4y ago
it seems either way kenya will stay poor? i think the solution is to either not colonize or not make such a mess. We should ask the Brits what their idea was.
fomine3 4y ago
Just curious does anyone found ChatGPT contain Kenyan ethics bias
elevaet 4y ago
I grew up in the era of peak-Adbusters, and ate up the narrative on exploitative sweatshops where people in 3rd world countries are forced to make my shoes on near slavery wages. Fast forward a decade, and my now mother-in-law described how she worked in one of these shops, literally making Nikes, and it was an amazing opportunity for her at the time, and helped get her out of poverty. This caused an instant perspective shift. Thats not to say that we shouldn't be on the lookout for exploitation, and pushing for better working conditions in general, but the truth (as always) is more nuanced than bad guys and good guys.
blackoil 4y ago
As a devil's advocate, would all people against $2 salary be also support a call on maximum salary? E.g. A software engineer with 2 years experience cannot get more than $25/hr because that is the just global average decided?
rmrf100 4y ago
This is good fo Kenya, Thank you guys.
hackrnusr 4y ago
Have to wonder what's the definition of toxic. Anything that's not sufficiently politically correct?
DuckFeathers 4y ago
As a result, they traumatised a whole bunch of people (and their progeny) who will continue to live the trauma much longer than OpenAI will exist.

517 points by mkeeter 4y ago

bilsbie 4y ago

To be fair, I find the censorship makes it more toxic.

alpos 4y ago
I tend to agree with this notion. Instead of dealing with the fact that humans do and produce tons of awful shit, we just do our best to ignore it and pretend human nature is better than it is. This is delusion on a grand scale and it's hard to find examples in the historical record of good things ultimately coming from lots of people acting in the world while being divorced from reality.
- ketzu 4y ago
  I find this notion rather unconvincing. To me, there is a huge difference between acknowloging that humans produce terrible stuff and training an AI to produce more of it. Humanity has improved thanks to our desire to go beyond the worst aspects of our nature instead of embracing it at every chance.
  - alpos 4y ago
    No one is suggesting we should embrace the worst. Only that ignoring it at every chance instead of ever properly dealing with it isn't the most helpful thing if we actually want to follow that desire to go beyond.
    - ketzu 4y ago
      Could you elaborate what you consider "properly dealing with it" in this context? They are definitely not ignoring it, as they take extra steps to make it not produce it. As they try to stop it from producing it, I assumed that critizing this filtering means someone wants the AI to produce those things.
      - alpos 4y ago
        The context is probably what's throwing you off then. I took bilsbie's comment to be a context expansion here. Imagining how this general strategy of censoring what's actually out there plays out in the long run and wider context of how all of humanity deals or doesn't deal with what human minds are actually capable of producing. Also note that this wouldn't just be about a bot producing more bad stuff. ChatGPT also, or even mostly, answers questions and provides information. If bots like this do not even know about the filtered out content they cannot, for example, give an accurate or original answer to a question like: "Is nazi-ism on the rise?" The best they can do is regurgitate news posts, pundit commentary, and existing research articles. That might be good enough, but if a bot were able to see all the content out there it might even give a statistical summary of everything on the web and comment on the rate at which pro-nazi web articles are published compared to articles of all other types. That would be a useful way to shed some daylight on the issue. If most of our efforts most of the time are spent merely filtering out the trash, then we're still just ignoring pretty big issues. The strategy as applied here isn't exactly wrong for what OpenAI is trying to achieve but it still ends up being another example of people being more willing to spend a lot of resources pretending humans are better than they are than we are willing to spend a lot of resources fixing the underlying issues that make some people so screwed up to begin with. This new ml model they are building will be used to filter out child porn, among other things, from the output of ChatGPT, so users of that bot don't see it. It seems their ideal case is to reliably filter it from the input as well, so even the bot doesn't know about it. Which is fine for what they're doing, so they'll probably stop there. However, once you have something like a reliable detector for human misery and the warped human minds the produce it you're actually well on your way to developing a tool chain that could help authorities and mental health professionals identify and track down those warped mind as soon as or possibly before they cause harm. I'm not confident I know the whole field well enough to say no one is doing something like that but it does seem like the preferred option for most all AI teams is to spend $200k filtering out the problem rather than taking the time to build something that reduces or eliminates the root cause. And that stance is reasonable enough at the team/company levels because you'd have to do the former anyway even if you also do the latter. So of course it's not OpenAI's job to do that and this isn't a moralistic judgement on the teams building AI in general either. Humanity just isn't interested in solving those problems for real in the same way we are interested in a bot that can write code or tell us interesting stories. We want to know the police are on it in some capacity, but there's not likely to be enough investment in it to actually solve the problems any time soon. In the long run, being increasingly good at filtering this stuff out tends toward a future where most people can live their whole lives without ever becoming aware that these awful problems exist and possibly happen in their own cities. And if most people are never aware of a problem, it's not likely to ever get enough attention and funding to be solved. So that is the sense in which I can find agreement with bilsbie's notion that merely filtering out the bad stuff humans produce can be more toxic than letting people see what humans are really like. Though again, it's hard to blame any one team for just wanting to filter that stuff out. --- And there is actually at least one unrelated other way to look at bilsbie's comment so you might ask them what they meant as well. The other way I can think of is asking who decides what's acceptable content? And then expand the context on that to a hypothetical world where stuff like ChatGPT is ubiquitous. There are some obvious cases we'll all pretty universally call bad, so we don't mind someone training the bots to filter that out. However, there's other examples like a lot of horror books/films or even mystery/detective novels and such that push the boundaries in order to get people to think, if those get caught in the filters too, then we're doing humanity a disservice by effectively banning/digitally-burning books/articles/web-sites. And let's not forget, if people are good at building such filter systems for all the bots you can bet governments with a eye for controlling thought will be interested in installing some filters of their own.

rcdwealth 4y ago

[dead]

doubtingbobmas 4y ago

I find this kind of hard to believe. Having Africans remove "toxic" content is absurd, because Africans tend to be incredibly misogynistic and homophobic with an incredible amount of hatred and vitriol towards "the west" (and now Ukraine). Right now, go onto Facebook, search for Ukraine and open the first 10 posts. You will see that at least 70% of all comments are racist and from Africans. Now search for "gay murder" and you will find that 90% of the comments are from Africans agreeing with the murder and blaming the gay victim. Now do the same search for "priest beheaded" .. then "priest burned". Having Kenyans train ChatGPT surely means they brought their religious and homophobic biases. This dataset must be garbage.

LisaDziuba 4y ago

[dead]

SidiBlak 4y ago

I've been living in Kenya for the last 7 years. ChatGPT is exploiting workers. Yes many live in poverty, especially in Nairobi, but one 'good' meal on the side of the road is about $1. To put it in better perspective 1 dozen eggs cost $1.80. Even in slums there is a cost for living in something barely more than a shanty house, without running water and/or proper toilets. My vote is ChatGPT is being exploitative, what they are paying should be an hourly rate. They are taking time from people with education and who speak at least two languages. Just because you can pay people less, does not mean you should.

volodarik_lemon 4y ago

well, if local workers are ready to work for just terms and it's legal...

Ombudsman 4y ago

To put it in perspective, the average income in Kenya is around $1.25 an hour and tbh (as a Kenyan) I really can't see it as a bad thing. A lot of people here live in abject poverty, they live in situations you can't really begin to imagine. So any sort of help coming our way is good.

vit05 4y ago
This salary is higher than the minimum in Brazil. Of course, without labor rights. They would probably also get thousands of employees in Brazil if they needed to, as well as in several other countries. I myself do work with mediation of content for several social networks, getting a little more than that. The only problem is that the monthly hours are irregular, there are very few hours. If someone has an offer of 4 dollars an hour for 200 hours a week without any benefits, I accept it immediately. And that's half the US salary, as I understand it.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Hope it pays for the therapy they'll need.
argc 4y ago
Yeah it seems like it would only be worth mentioning if its less than the local livable/minimum wage or the employees were mistreated.
csomar 4y ago
I don't think your comment makes it any better. With all respect but given the HDI of Kenya, I don't think your average Kenyan worker is that versed in English, has a laptop and an Internet connection. $2/hour for a company like OpenAI (which can, most likely, afford more) is pure modern slavery.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  It used to be called globalization
- ajmurmann 4y ago

ykovalenko 4y ago

[flagged]

ryanwaggoner 4y ago
What else was widely hailed in 2022 as an impressive technological innovation? ChatGPT was being talked about in my non-eng circles, which is unusual.
- affgrff2 4y ago
  Diffusion models?
- howling 4y ago
  nuclear fusion reaction with net energy gain?
  - faeyanpiraat 4y ago
    It was nowhere near net gain.
  - arbitrage 4y ago
    net energy gain if you ignore the overwhelming net energy loss, sure.
belltaco 4y ago
Just curious about what people think were 2022's top tech innovations, can you list them.
- choeger 4y ago
  I would bet at least one of them involves dropping explosives on Russian soldiers.
avindroth 4y ago
It pretty much was.

amelius 4y ago

Meanwhile, your shirt and pants were made by Indian children working for less than $2 per hour.

rchaud 4y ago
[flagged]
key_stroker 4y ago
If only, we wear what you wore last year and threw away, I'd say 95% of all clothes sold in Kenya are used.
- HanClinto 4y ago
  I don't think the GP is speaking to Kenyans wearing Indian-manufactured clothes -- I think that they're pointing out the hypocrisy in Time readers (and its authors) who live in highly-developed countries, wearing clothing made by low-wage workers, who are just looking for any reason to criticize OpenAI, without applying that same criticism to themselves.
  - yunwal 4y ago
    Ah yeah, the classic “in order to criticize a thing, you must first criticize and root out every possible worse thing.” People have no way of knowing where the things they buy come from or how to source things ethically unless people write articles like this and push for higher standards when they see an opportunity. It’s one thing to protect genuinely well-meaning people who can’t meet a purity standard, but OpenAI has a track record of dishonesty (starting with their name).
    - factsarelolz 4y ago
      > People have no way of knowing where the things they buy come from I don't know about other places and maybe I'm an outlier but I check everything for where it's produced / manufactured. Most if not all items in the US are required to have where the item was produced/manufactured. Some may say "Manufactured in the US with globally sourced material" makes it harder to pin down where each of the components originated from. Clothes and other items the country of origin is on the tag.

yasp 4y ago

[flagged]

karmasimida 4y ago

So? This is good salary locally I believe.

AlexandrB 4y ago
Extend this logic to remote work and your salary should scale strictly with where you're living. Living in Ohio but working for a bay area startup? Expect to get paid a "good salary locally". Why not, right?
- sidlls 4y ago
  That is the case in the vast majority of tech companies, though. They (almost) all have something like a "regional adjustment", "location based" or other classification for salaries in different areas. Some are more extreme than others. The company I work for (it's a relatively well-known tech company) certainly has it, and I know Google and other FAANGs do, too.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  That's how it works. An engineer in the Bay Area can easily get 10 interviews next week and has to be paid more to stay.
- dekhn 4y ago
  yes, that makes sense. there should be regional cost of living adjustments.
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
  Point is that when you interview in SF and then leverage remote work to go wherever you want they cannot police where you are and determine the appropriate salary. OpenAI went shopping for Kenyan labor and those who did the job were not American and never interviewed in SF
- joshlemer 4y ago
  This is more or less how it works, yes.
- 4y ago

iso1631 4y ago

Looks like the median salary in Kenya is about $3.50 an hour ($7k/year)

brookst 4y ago

Headline implies there’s something negative here, but I’m not seeing it. Was OpenAI supposed to hire high-skill workers in developed countries to do this work?

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
It's just the dichotomy of using $2/hour labor to build a product that makes you obscenely wealthy. As another poster said- in Kenya a job is a job and they still paid above average. Money going to Kenya is a good thing. They are doing the work so it must be worth it.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  This also seems like a much better service job than the horrible scarring moderation jobs at facebook or factory work for apple. Heck maybe even better than most Amazon US jobs at the warehouses
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Well, maybe not quite: > Almost more interesting in that article I found that Sama, the Kenyan company, was also asked to collect CP and brutal/gore images for OpenAI. After delivering 1400 images, Sama cancelled the contract as this was even too much for them. OpenAI then talked about "miscommunication" and they actually did not really want those CP images. Well, they made its own category for it and asked Sama to collect images of several other categories, but somehow it was lost in communication that for one of theses categories, no images should be collected. Because they are illegal. OpenAI swears they never opened the images they received (and paid for). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34427118
- truculent 4y ago
  "I think maybe there is no borderline between countries now because we all live in the same country, it’s called capitalism."
- gowld 4y ago

mcast 4y ago

I wonder how much this would have costed if they used mechanical Turk instead.

tiffanyh 4y ago
Given Microsoft invested $1B & incentivized use of Azure, I wouldn't be surprised if they are prohibited from using other clouds (i.e., AWS). But I too wonder what the cost would be as a comparison.
- mcast 4y ago
  That makes sense, but I wonder if MTurk is still useful today with the advances in AI, I haven't heard much about it in the last few years.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

I don't have a strong opinion on this myself, but I am curious how the general sentiment of "that's a good wage for Kenya and this is fine" might change if they were hiring developers there instead.

welshwelsh 4y ago
Wouldn't change at all for me. If quality developers could be hired for $2 per hour, that would be fantastic. Imagine how much progress we could make. The first thing I would do is hire a bunch of people to fix the bugs in my favorite open source software. In the short term it might make my life harder as I would probably lose my high paying development job. But that's absolutely not a good reason to oppose progress.
PeterisP 4y ago
That's how it's working, many companies have developers in low-cost areas, and they definitely aren't paying them USA-level salaries, often not even USA-minimum wage. Developer salaries even in such countries tend to be far better than $2/h, but that's explicitly because western companies like these "were hiring developers there instead", if they weren't, the developer salaries there would match the local market and be even lower.
alpos 4y ago
So long as developers want to be paid by the hour rather than paid for a specific result, I would say this is fine too. The problem everyone is waffling on here isn't the competitiveness of the wage, it's the gap between the value of what the labor produces and the value offered to produce it. But you can't escape that gap so long as you're fundamentally trading time for money. If you want to capture more of the value of your work, you become a contractor and bid firm-fixed or cost-plus contracts instead of labor-hour or time-and-materials. If you want to capture even more value than that, you work on building business systems and selling a valuable product or service rather than spending your work hours doing the tasks themselves. Whether you're in Kenya or the US and whether you're doing undesirable or highly desirable work, it is not a moral failing of the business you are working for that they did not also take the time to ensure that you could have become a contractor if you wanted to or that they did not ensure that your economic situation allows sufficient market opportunities for you to quit and form a business if you wanted to.

phphphphp 4y ago

> [...] OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya was Sama, a San Francisco-based firm that employs workers in Kenya [...] Does this qualify as nominative determinism, given OpenAI founder Sam Altman's username is... sama?

0xblood 4y ago

Almost more interesting in that article I found that Sama, the Kenyan company, was also asked to collect CP and brutal/gore images for OpenAI. After delivering 1400 images, Sama cancelled the contract as this was even too much for them. OpenAI then talked about "miscommunication" and they actually did not really want those CP images. Well, they made its own category for it and asked Sama to collect images of several other categories, but somehow it was lost in communication that for one of theses categories, no images should be collected. Because they are illegal. OpenAI swears they never opened the images they received (and paid for).

ianhawes 4y ago
Directing someone to commit a crime is still a crime. OpenAI most likely has criminal liability in this instance and the FBI should open an investigation if they haven't already.
- gowld 4y ago
  Criminal liability for someone misunderstanding a request and doing what they were not asked to do? Where did you earn your law degree?
  - xdavidliu 4y ago
    You have it backwards; OpenAI was the one that made the request. OpenAI claimed that the Kenyan company misunderstood the request. Your parent comment is claiming that OpenAI is criminally liable for making the request.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- bluena 4y ago
  Crime is not the appropriate word but there's clearly a well documented history of abusing conditions toward data labeling workers [1] [2] [3] For those looking for an AI data labeling service also tries to help workers along the way, here's a plug to the company I started "dataprep.be" [4] We have a small preference for working workers with special needs (deaf, mute and employees with small handicaps). Public subsidies for these type of workers help our case in the EU as well as contraints for some public institutions in the EU to hire more handicap workers. With clients more sensitive to costs, we also work with remote data labelers from developing countries. We help putting checks in place to limit forced and child labor. We pay 5% extra so they have time to learn high demand tech skills. (Using Khan Academy and free access to a normally 250$/year Datacamp subscription) Happy to work with the HN crowd or just receive feedback and mentoring! (My email is in my profile) [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/88apnv/underpaid-workers-are-being-forced-to-train-biased-ai-on-mechanical-turk https://www.vice.com/en/article/88apnv/underpaid-workers-are... [2] https://gizmodo.com/horror-stories-from-inside-amazons-mechanical-turk-1840878041 https://gizmodo.com/horror-stories-from-inside-amazons-mecha... [3] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/behind-tiktoks-boom-a-legion-of-traumatised-10-a-day-content-moderators https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/beh... [4] https://www.dataprep.be https://www.dataprep.be

nomdep 4y ago

I’m surprised no one here is challenging the assumption that ChatGPT needs to be “less toxic”.

sunrise54 4y ago
Exactly. Also, what constitutes "toxic" and shouldn't AI output be "toxic" if the user intentionally requests it?
- Karunamon 4y ago
  The answer to the second half of the question appears to be "no" at least if tech companies have any say on the matter. At some point they collectively decided that users are children who have no agency and must be paternalistically protected from the wrong words appearing on the screen.
danuker 4y ago
I'd pay into a crowdfund to train a low-memory language model that can swear. Bonus points if you call it GPTCarlin. But I see why "serious business" investors will want to avoid anything controversial. It is their business to suck life out of everything.
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  You can tell that ChatGPT has been neutered in being rendered so safe. It basically will refuse to disagree with you, even if you get crazy and wrong. That makes it vulnerable to disruption.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Given how, for some topics—especially about itself or AI generally—ChatGPT seems to really get stuck in a rut, I suspect there's a lot of manually-written processing and categorization and massaging that's happening before (and, probably, after) the AI-proper gets ahold of prompts. I further suspect they audit responses to find topics where it comes up with shitty ones, and then fix those with the same kind of manual process. I'd love to know how much of its seeming smart is because it's just that good and how much is because humans directly intervene, on some level, in how it responds. Is it that much better than other efforts, purely from machine learning, or has it just had tons and tons more human hours put into tweaking it than others have? How much of it's "real" AI and how much is good ol' hand-written decision trees?

pelasaco 4y ago

Toxic article from Time about ChatGPT using Kenyan Workers to make ChatGPT less toxic. We went full circle here.

etc-hosts 4y ago

The company OpenAI used to manage workers in Kenya, Sama, has come up before https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-employee-treatment/ https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-...

chx 4y ago

When are we going to learn? Uber did Greyball and nothing happened. Its corporate charter should've been revoked and the executives jailed. A very clear message has been sent to the tech companies by this: do whatever you want, the law doesn't apply to you. OpenAI did this and nothing happened. At the next pandemic, some sort of this generative AI will be used to write the anti scientific articles and woe upon to you then. This time it was bad but that will be a thousand times worse. Can't find who said OpenAI basically released a zero day on human cognition without a patch. Outlaw it already until we find one. This is no joke here.

zackees 4y ago
[dead]
tqi 4y ago
What law are you claiming OpenAI has broken?
- chx 4y ago
  If there isn't one then make one. It is a danger to society and I am not kidding.
  - tqi 4y ago
    What is the danger?
    - chx 4y ago
      This pandemic a few hundreds of thousands have died in the USA alone because a few, very few people decided to pander anti scientific views. Which found a very fertile ground thanks to the relentless work of conservative pundits in the last few decades destroying the credibility of media. Check Charlie Stykes' How the Right Lost Its Mind -- and note he blames himself as well, rightfully so. The next pandemic when these articles will be written by these AI will be a lot worse. You can write a thousand very scientific sounding papers in seconds. Even right now to appease these morons the world has largely dropped masking mandates and that kills and disables people. There is no scientific reason not to mask and every reason to do it but it's politically not expedient. Check https://jessicawildfire.substack.com/p/heres-150-sources-on-covid-to-share https://jessicawildfire.substack.com/p/heres-150-sources-on-... So the danger is the death of millions in the next pandemic. And that's just what immediately comes to mind as the biggest, most concrete danger. Other dangers include the almost immediate obliteration of independent artists -- there's a lawsuit now, good but it won't be able to do much, even a few hundred millions in damages is just cost of doing business to these folks. So many possibilities... https://mobile.twitter.com/Dereklowe/status/1599035870308618241 https://mobile.twitter.com/Dereklowe/status/1599035870308618...

1659447091 4y ago

Maybe I need more coffee, but wouldn't it be easier to not add text from certain parts of the internet, or make scrapping bots with controls to avoid those areas? I understand it would still grab some unwanted things, but it seems it would be much easier to deal with. Unless of course, this is basically the entirety of the internet and I just refuse to see it as such. There is a section that mentioned "An online search for the text reveals that it originated from an online erotica site". If you dont want sexually explicit text, then maybe dont include text from literary erotica sites in the first place? Or is it like advertising where companies keep passing around the same chunk of data and continue adding to it? Still, I would think making or paying for better(smarter) scrapping bots would be cheaper.

falcolas 4y ago
I, at this point in time, don't believe any vetting of the training materials was done, because they needed too much of it to make their ML model work. They didn't check for licenses. They didn't check for content. They didn't check for correctness. At this point, it's cheaper for them to manually alter the output than it is to retrain on a more appropriate data set.

kryz 4y ago

I suspect this may not have gone down the way the article is reporting. OpenAi paid Sama $12/hr for the work and they in turn paid their employees $2/hr. Yet because workers were reportedly affected by the content Sama cancelled the contract? I think we all know they would just replace the $2/hr workers. It doesn’t check out

richrichardsson 4y ago
> OpenAi paid Sama $12/hr for the work and they in turn paid their employees $2/hr. This kind of shit really boils my piss. I did extra work on the Alexander movie in Morocco. There was a pay disparity between what the local production company were paying Westerners vs what they paid locals [1]. I'm almost 100% sure the production company paying the local company would have been paying the same price for both. [1] - this isn't even the half of what was wrong with the situation; they were filming during Ramadan, so the locals couldn't eat/drink/smoke anything during the daylight hours and made to stand around in the blazing sun. One old lady fainted. The production company asked the Westerners to please try and keep out of sight whilst drinking/eating/smoking between takes, but then at the same time telling us we can't move from our spots lest we break continuity. Towards the end of filming it almost turned into a riot due to the bad treatment of the locals. Total joke.
factsarelolz 4y ago
Not sure why this isn't the top comment. Sama could have provided the mental health support that employees may have needed with the 10$/hr per employee profit they were making. Sama didn't and decided that instead of losing profit by providing their employees with mental healthcare they canceled the contract. Smells fishy.
notahacker 4y ago
That's effectively answered a paragraph down. Sama cancelled the contract after being asked by OpenAI to collect material that was illegal under US law, at a time when a negative story about work they were doing for Facebook meant that journalists were interested in interviewing their [ex]employees That's sufficiently risky for a company to be prepared to fire a high profile client, and whilst their margins were huge the value of the actual project was only $200k, which isn't going to seem like riches to Sama's California-based management team.

xiphias2 4y ago

The terrible situation in Kenya (and all other poor countries) is created by the predatory loans provided by IMF (and the countries that copy those types of loans). It's unproductive to talk about the hundreds of billions of dollars of slavery work that companies do until we have an answer for the trillions of dollars of toxic debt created by these huge organizations.

factsarelolz 4y ago
> (and the countries that copy those types of loans). What are the other countries? I know China is doling out these loans apart of their belt road initiative but I'm not up to speed on other countries hamstringing countries with unneeded infrastructure and billions in loans.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  China is of course the best in copying the west, but I don't know much details. Alex Gladstein is writing a new book about this huge problem, as the latest good books about it he found were in the 70s.
finikytou 4y ago
like IMF hindered korea?
boeingUH60 4y ago
No, the terrible situation is created by gross corruption, mismanagement, and unbelievable incompetence in those countries. I live in a similar country (Nigeria)…We Africans are the source of our own problems because we choose not to utilize our resources well and plunder the few we extract, not some boogeyman IMF that also gave loans to some countries that are prosperous today.
- xiphias2 4y ago
  The usual setup is that an extremely corrupt goverment leader takes out a loan that gives enough money for him to be reelected and put a bit away for himself. In return he increases income taxes, devalues the money and sets up the country for exporting luxury goods that are needed for 1st world countries (but local people would have no chance of buying) why destroying their own agriculture, so that they have to import inferior mass manufactured products from rich countries. On the long term the countries have to give back 10-20 times the original loan that is gone in a few years. Does any of this sound familiar to you?

mynameishere 4y ago

Two dollar an hour censors. I miss the days when the pope would personally review scientists' correspondence.

zoklet-enjoyer 4y ago

I find the following paragraph to be quite funny. "To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest."

stavros 4y ago

Please note the cognitive dissonance if you believe both that this is wrong and that remote workers' pay should be adjusted based on their location.

cabyn 4y ago

Sad to see the viewpoints of so many people framing this as "helping Kenya" or "They took the job, so it's worth it to them". I can assure you OpenAI did not have a charity meeting and say, "what poor, impoverished country can we lift up today?" It was "What country has limited labor laws, no unions, no red tape, and the cheapest labor we can find?" 99.99% of corporations put profit above people. That's why we still "benefit" from child labor and sweatshops, because we prefer cheap crap and money over the betterment of humanity. The same arguments given here were also given by coal miners in 1840's Europe[1],[2] when employing women and children, along the lines of "oh the children love it, they even get to see horses!" (and indeed, the children did show up to work every day, so why make a fuss?) [1]https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?PageId=Detail&DocId=100908&PageNo=2 https://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?Page... [2]https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1842/jun/07/employment-of-women-and-children-in https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1842/jun/...

99_00 4y ago
Both these things can be true at the same time OpenAI hired Kenyans because of limited labour law, no unions, no red tape, and the cheapest they can find. Getting these jobs is good for Kenya
- blagie 4y ago
  I would suspect that's only approximately true. OpenAI hired them because Kenya has hundreds of thousands of people who are fluent in English, but without the level of basic education or employability needed to earn more than $2/day. For simple outsourcing tasks like this one, outsourcing to Kenya is a win-win. You can drastically reduce costs, while significantly improving people's lives. That'd be true regardless of labor laws, unions, or otherwise. The legal system in Kenya isn't quiet as wonderful for business as you describe; it inherits British colonial bureaucracy, has some corruption, isn't all that laissez-faire, and can be a minor pain in the butt. Unions, likewise, would increase income, but not by enough to make this a bad deal. Kenya is competing with India and the Philippians here, not with low-cost US labor.
- 4y ago

nzoschke 4y ago

AI has always prompted ethical discussions but now that big ones are publicly available we society needs to speed run actually implementing major new ethical decisions. Yes ChatGPT needs to be “not toxic”. The company leadership believes this and is investing heavily researching and designing and implementing as many safe guards as possible. They know if they don’t do a good job here it will be a PR and support disaster and ultimate effect the bottom line. No serious customers will buy any AI product if there’s a chance it spews sex, hate speech or violence, etc. to their end users. At least for now, some humans somewhere in the chain will have to review toxic content to help train. It sounds particularly depressing to me that a $50B company can outsource this to Kenya for $200k. But I don’t know who else or how much money would make it better. Totally hypothetical but I bet some of the handsomely paid US engineers have a ton of policies in place to eliminate exposure to toxic content. But also when they do see some they have a much better foundation in life for it not triggering major mental health problems. What we really need to know is what OpenAIs whole portfolio of approaches, budgets, staff and outsourcing looks like. In the meantime kudos to Time for exposing one piece for public discourse.

sunrise54 4y ago
> What we really need to know is what OpenAIs whole portfolio of approaches, budgets, staff and outsourcing looks like. In other words, you want OpenAI to be...open? :)

trabant00 4y ago

Why didn't they ask the "AI" itself to filter the results? Isn't AI going to offer medical and legal advice soon? How will it do such things when it can't tell what is child abuse? Rhetorical question, at least for me.

dzonga 4y ago

people who are complaining about the wage being too low relative to western wages are 1. thinking in words instead of things 2. not looking at the alternative which is would kenyan's themselves be rather paid $2 or get nothing at all i'm african not kenyan and i'm glad these job opportunities exist. the headline is fake outrage from sjw westerners drinking lattes that cost 5 quid / 7 bucks

SwetDrems 4y ago

I feel like comments here are too focused on the $2 per hour aspect and not enough on the emotional abuse that this labour entails. Sure, maybe it's an "average wage", but the people performing this work are suffering mental trauma because for hours upon hours they are subjected to reading stories and viewing images of sexual abuse, assault, gore. The people performing this sort of extremely difficult emotional labour should be taken care of. It is disgusting for OpenAI to pay so little and at the same time have such little respect for humanity and decency.

hnarn 4y ago
What part of moderating ChatGPT involves looking at images?
- SwetDrems 4y ago
  Of course images are not relevant to ChatGPT (I never specified ChatGPT), but to other models being trained by OpenAI. From the article: "That month, Sama began pilot work for a separate project for OpenAI: collecting sexual and violent images—some of them illegal under U.S. law—to deliver to OpenAI."
alpos 4y ago
It's worth noting that OpenAI actually paid around six times that amount for this work. It's also worth noting that Sama actually did provide for their employee's mental health. They didn't do a good job of it but trying and failing at a thing doesn't quite qualify at the level of disgust imo. Especially not for the company that was outsourcing this. It's also worth noting that even if those of us in the peanut gallery would not trust the word of either OpenAI or Sama, it is not unreasonable for OpenAI's team to have trusted that Sama was doing what they said they were with regard to providing for their own employees mental health.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago

Tech journos having to scrape the bottom of the barrel for the Silicon Valley outrage du jour.

erenyeager 4y ago

People supporting this have a similar mentality to Arabian Gulf countries that treat laborers poorly: “we pay you so that makes us generous, shut up”. Of course, this behavior is unacceptable and needs to be condemned. Imo Using people’s conditions in poverty as a way to severely exploit them is like pimping out a starving child and wanting credit for sharing some of the earnings. There is nobody to protect the child and he’s desperate, but that doesn’t make the pimp correct.

tofuahdude 4y ago
Rising supply of jobs increases wages and quality of life. This is a good thing. The wages they're paying are substantially higher than all the local averages. This is a good thing. How is this "severely exploiting"? The alternative is that the Kenyan economy remain isolated, small, and impoverished. This is a bad thing.
- fzeroracer 4y ago
  You're using the exact same logic as those that were using child labour for coal mining in the 1800s. They're being specifically exploited because that is what the company set out to do. You could argue any number of benefits as a smokescreen but the reality is that they hired people in Kenya because they knew they could exploit them. Everything else is post-hoc rationalization.
  - tofuahdude 4y ago
    Except that nowhere did I advocate for child labor. That is obviously abhorrent and clear false equivalence. Are the employees adults? Yes. Are they being forced to work there? No. Are they choosing / trying to work there because the pay is higher than their alternatives? Yes. Very different than child labor.
abigail95 4y ago
How many Kenyans do you employ? More than the few hundred you're trying to get fired? How does that improve their situation?

bannedbybros 4y ago

[dead]

endlessvoid94 4y ago

Awful journalism

bilsbie 4y ago

So whatever harm the Kenyans have saved us from, doesn’t that cancel out by exposing them to it?

alpos 4y ago
That's not proportional, by design even. The whole game here is to do a small amount of work and multiply the gains by an infinite number of results from people using the bot. That's always the game with any kind of technology. So no, having a few people experience something bad so billions can avoid experiencing anything bad ever does not cancel out.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago

At least Kenyan workers get $2 an hour ... I haven't seen a single penny for the hours of my life spent on recaptchas.

dragonwriter 4y ago
> I haven't seen a single penny for the hours of my life spent on recaptchas. If you value the services pritected by recaptcha at less than a penny, why do you do the recaptchas at all?
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  >> If you value the services pritected by recaptcha at less than a penny Kindly point where I wrote that.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    >> If you value the services pritected by recaptcha at less than a penny > Kindly point where I wrote that. “At least Kenyan workers get $2 an hour … I haven’t seen a single penny for the hours of my life spent on recaptchas.” [0] Payment in kind is payment. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34429092
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
      You mean recaptcha is payment for services? Of course not, they don't get any money from g$$gle. In fact, site loses money if I fail to access it due to recaptcha.

cactusplant7374 4y ago

Do projects like this still exist? The overhead to develop an AI that doesn't actually understand anything must be quite high at this point.

aorth 4y ago

2 USD is currently ~248 KES, which is actually a reasonable wage for unskilled labor in Kenya. If you can do this work for eight hours a day, for roughly twenty days a month, then you're making ~40,000 KES per month. That's a very good salary for a huge portion of the population in Kenya. Source: living and working in Kenya since 2007.

Balgair 4y ago
Hey! Anything else you can share with us about the Kenyan tech/start-up scene? How's the rocketry business there?

advisedwang 4y ago

Forget pay, I'm more interested in the quality of the training data this produces. If you have Kenyans rating what constitutes hate speech or obscenity, you are going to end up with an AI that reflects Kenyan mores. If you pay peanuts, you're going to get low-effort evaluations that miss subtly. Even with a handbook and instructions, this is unavoidable to a certain degree.

kderbyma 4y ago

Just going to say it....These companies are run by criminals....all of them are always connected to crime. it's a fact. not an opinion. OpenAI has blood money. It's blood diamonds but information.....same thing....just modernized and remote....

h1fra 4y ago

So much comments saying it's good for kenyans while most of us would not review gore and toxic content all day long for our own local minimum wage. This is clear abuse of cheap labor, and also a good way to not provide psychological support that would be required in our own country.

gr4yb34rd 4y ago

Wages in San Francisco are way higher than Alabama, too.

lazyeye 4y ago

To all the likely incredibly highly paid people here (by world standards) commenting on the poor Kenyan wages. Rather than having vacuous, facile discussions on social media that achieve absolutely nothing other than signal how virtuous you are, why dont you donate a significant chunk of your wages to an African charity?

vore 4y ago
How does a vacuous, facile suggestion like donating a significant chunk of my wages to some African charity stop companies like Sama from taking OpenAI's $12.50/hr and paying out $2/hr and pocketing the change?
- lazyeye 4y ago
  Well it does nothing of course. Nothing at all. Just like all the useless moral posturing on here (you know, as long as there is no personal cost involved beyond expressing an opinion).

georgeg 4y ago

Am Kenyan in Tech/science. For the nature and the volume of work, the wages sighted here are grossly low. In addition, it appears that Sama was paid in US dollars and negotiated a great contract with OpenAI only to then exploit Kenyans and legally hind under the umbrella of low wages. Shame shame shame. This is so distressing " ... All of the four employees interviewed by TIME described being mentally scarred by the work. Although they were entitled to attend sessions with “wellness” counselors, all four said these sessions were unhelpful and rare due to high demands to be more productive at work...."

renewiltord 4y ago

Selfish bleeding hearts are such an annoyance. They never give you good jobs. They always take away the jobs you can get. This makes sense, though. If you work for cheap for someone who is willing to pay you, both of you are happy. The person who is unhappy is a third party who you are harming by preventing him from charging more. So that guy will invent justifications: no job should pay this little, they don't know better, etc etc But from the fact that these people never get you a better job and always take away a good job, you can tell what they want: to stop you from outcompeting them. Place it in obvious terms like that and it's clear who is trying to harm you and who is a feasible partner.

Imnimo 4y ago

It can both be true that the wage is pretty decent for Kenya, and also that OpenAI should have paid more.

bilater 4y ago

Alternative headline: OpenAI hired workers and paid them money to help with RLHF training for their GPT-3.5 model.

taylorius 4y ago

Bear in mind Time magazine is presumably not the greatest fan of large language models, since they'll be churning out Time magazine articles by the 100s, given another year of development.

croddin 4y ago

It’s funny that @sama’s company is working with a company named Sama. It also confused me when reading some of the comments at first.

QuadmasterXLII 4y ago

A Kenyan working 40 hours a week for two dollars an hour is making twice the GDP per capita. A US citizen working 40 hours a week for US minimum wage is making 1/5 of the GDP per capita

altairprime 4y ago

Could they afford to pay US minimum wage to workers, and they’re merely pocketing the difference? Or are they wholly unable to afford US minimum wages and are papering over that inability through Kenyan labor?

churchill 4y ago

I see so many comments from self-anointed do-gooders that I just have to explain something from my lived experience. I'm Nigerian. I graduated high school at 15 and because my family didn't have the funds for uni, I got a job in what was essentially a sweatshop factory with extra steps. I got paid 12k Naira ($16) per month. After all, I had was a secondary school education and I couldn't bargain for better. Roughly one year later, I got a job writing for a content mill where I was paid $1 for 100 words. I can't describe my happiness when I got my first $50 for 5,000 words. All earned while sitting at a desk, typing away on a broken laptop, using unreliable internet. To a social justice warrior in SF or NY, it might have been exploitation, but to me an African teenager with no relevant experience or higher education, it was the first step I needed to pull myself up by my bootstraps. I levered up and today, I make the same or a bit more than quite a few freelance writers in the West. Point is, it's okay to feel bad for these Africans; but if you really do, you will support free trade - that's the most successful instrument for lifting humans out of poverty. Without this "starvation-level" gig like some of you may call it, these workers would settle for something less. Today, Nigeria's minimum wage is around 30k Naira, yet many Nigerians don't even make that much. On the other hand, a worker making $2 per hour 8 hours 5 days will net $80 per week or 59k Naira at the current market rates. If you complain someone is exploiting me, please give me a better job - or let me take my least worst option.

zht 4y ago
what about criticisms from fellow Kenyans who say that it is exploitation?
- churchill 4y ago
  Are their opinions more valid than that of the Kenyans that took these jobs? The government can mandate a "fair" wage, but the government never employs everyone at that rate. These "exploiters" are actually giving Africans money for their labor - I think I'm more on the side of those who pay money for an African's labor vs. those that stand on the sidelines and try to determine what is fair.
churchill 4y ago

forinti 4y ago

~US$2 is the minimum wage in Brazil, Turkey, Russia, Chile, and a few others.

lordfrito 4y ago

Talk about a story with a political agenda. Just seems like a plain old political outrage clickbait article with the words ChatGPT bolted in to make it topical. The kind which I've apparently developed a new dismissive reflex towards.

thunkshift1 4y ago

This has got to be the most dumbass news article related to chatgpt I have come across

skrbjc 4y ago

"The contracts stated that OpenAI would pay an hourly rate of $12.50 to Sama for the work, which was between six and nine times the amount Sama employees on the project were taking home per hour." OpenAI paid $12 an hour, it's Sama that paid them $2 an hour. People should be upset at Sama, not OpenAI. I'm sure you could find Americans willing to label data for $12 an hour. From OpenAI's perspective, they likely thought they were doing good by going with Sama, since Sama's mission is to provide work to people in Africa. From their website: "Since our founding, we’ve pioneered new technologies and business methods that harness the power of markets for social good, meaningfully improving employment and income outcomes for those with the greatest barriers to formal work." This is a story about Sama exploiting cheap labor in Africa, if that's what you want to call it, rather than OpenAI specifically aiming to do that.

eliasdaler 4y ago
Ah yes, "Don't blame company, blame the contractors". That's exactly why companies use contractors more and more - plausible deniability. Same with CEOs hiding behind many layers of hierarchy so that they can always say "Well, it wasn't ME who made the decision".
wardedVibe 4y ago
Now that is an absurd overhead. 500%?! Gross
choppaface 4y ago
Do we know how many workers were also enrolled into WorldCoin? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-16/worldcoin-the-eyeball-scanning-crypto-unicorn-hits-signup-snags https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-16/worldcoin...
MarcoZavala 4y ago
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DuckFeathers 4y ago
Now, do revenue/salary for ALL companies in the US.

nojvek 4y ago

I grew up in Kenya. Low level work pays about 10,000 Ksh for cleaners, construction/warehouse workers e.t.c That's ~$80 USD/month. At 160hrs/month, that is $0.5/hr. Not ideal, but $2/hr is an upgrade for many.

aaron695 4y ago

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Alifatisk 4y ago

Can’t we rename OpenAI to ClosedAI?

btbuildem 4y ago

Everyone is focusing on the salary, but have you read the article? It's legitimately problematic that there is a dark, vile essence of this being abstracted away -- the shiny, attractive, safe-for-advertisers front, vs the violent and disgusting "back end" with manual labourers sifting through the muck. It feels like it's a consequence of indiscriminate ingestion of datasets. Like, did OpenAI really have to point their data hoovers at 4chan?

agilob 4y ago

Don't worry about the $2 because later on they used everyone else for free to see if we can trick ChatGPT into sudo mode, describing how to produce methamphetamine, or producing increasingly racist jokes.

throwaway14356 4y ago

it seems either way kenya will stay poor? i think the solution is to either not colonize or not make such a mess. We should ask the Brits what their idea was.

fomine3 4y ago

Just curious does anyone found ChatGPT contain Kenyan ethics bias

elevaet 4y ago

I grew up in the era of peak-Adbusters, and ate up the narrative on exploitative sweatshops where people in 3rd world countries are forced to make my shoes on near slavery wages. Fast forward a decade, and my now mother-in-law described how she worked in one of these shops, literally making Nikes, and it was an amazing opportunity for her at the time, and helped get her out of poverty. This caused an instant perspective shift. Thats not to say that we shouldn't be on the lookout for exploitation, and pushing for better working conditions in general, but the truth (as always) is more nuanced than bad guys and good guys.

blackoil 4y ago

As a devil's advocate, would all people against $2 salary be also support a call on maximum salary? E.g. A software engineer with 2 years experience cannot get more than $25/hr because that is the just global average decided?

rmrf100 4y ago

This is good fo Kenya, Thank you guys.

hackrnusr 4y ago

Have to wonder what's the definition of toxic. Anything that's not sufficiently politically correct?

DuckFeathers 4y ago

As a result, they traumatised a whole bunch of people (and their progeny) who will continue to live the trauma much longer than OpenAI will exist.