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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 l

• 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
    It's not slavery though, since nobody is forced to take the job. This clearly was something Kenyan workers were happy to have as an option, otherwise they wouldn't have taken the job. If everyone did what OpenAI did and moved work like this to Kenya, salary would quickly go up. If few companies moved their work there, comp will stay low. It seems the low price is one of the main attractors right now. So shaming companies into paying more, likely will just move the work elsewhere and leave workers there with $0/hr.
    • key_stroker 4y ago
      You're right nobody is forcing them, they simply lack an alternative, some money is better than none, no matter what it costs, right?
      • CoastalCoder 4y ago
        It sounds like you're suggesting some different approach for how to calculate a wage offer. Can you elaborate?
      • gautamdivgi 4y ago
        Why is that an OpenAI problem? It’s something the Kenyan government needs to solve. I fail to see why every company needs to subscribe to an SJW mindset. They paid decent wages by Kenyan standards it seems. They did not force, exploit or abuse the workers.
      • ajmurmann 4y ago
        Poverty and inequality are terrible. OpenAI should be ashamed that they just made it marginally better for some folks in Kenya instead of solving this massive problem in its entirety that has nothing to do with their company. /s
      • chrischen 4y ago
        Yes, some money is better than none. That is exactly why it is better. They are literally doing something whereas you are probably doing nothing (or much less than what they are doing).
  • 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
    This is a really good troll. I almost tried to debate with a person on the internet over whether getting a data entry job that pays 50% over the national average was slavery. Kudos, sir.
    • affgrff2 4y ago
      The choice of words reveal the intention.
    • CoastalCoder 4y ago
      It's anyone's guess as to whether or not the OP was trying to troll. That said, I can see some benefit in occasionally testing viewpoints that are "obviously" true.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • tw1984 4y ago
    > $2/hour for a company like OpenAI (which can, most likely, afford more) is pure modern slavery. by using the same argument, you can claim that someone taking home $300k USD a year living in CA is a victim of modern slavery simply just because his/her employer can afford more.
  • clucas 4y ago
    If we're going to expand the term "slavery" to include at-will employment for pay, we should probably repeal the 13th Amendment and replace it with something a little more precise.
  • davidguetta 4y ago
    Today Anon discovered poverty and economic inequalities.
  • adolph 4y ago
    > I don't think your average Kenyan worker is that versed in English Kenya is a multilingual country. Swahili, a Bantu language, and English are widely spoken as lingua francas and serve as the two official languages. English was inherited from colonial rule (see British Kenya). https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Languages_of_Kenya https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Languages_of_Kenya
  • kris_wayton 4y ago
    It does seem a fair observation that having a group of people that aren't 100% well versed in the language and culture of the subject matter might not deliver the best results.
  • welshwelsh 4y ago
    >a company like OpenAI (which can, most likely, afford more) Hate this argument. As a for-profit company, OpenAI is legally and ethically obligated to minimize unnecessary expenses. It's purpose is to develop AI systems, not to provide people with high-paying jobs.
  • quattrofan 4y ago
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  • abenga 4y ago
    Half of Kenyans have smartphones, practically every corner of the country has 4G internet. Large parts of Nairobi have broadband connections to the home. It's not nirvana, but it's really not as dire as you are implying.
• replwoacause 4y ago
  Not sure I would call this "help". These workers were subjected to the most vile and graphic depictions of sexual abuse content imaginable for next to nothing. This whole thing makes OpenAI seem evil if you ask me. Just another company exploiting people who are already being exploited. It's depressing.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • danuker 4y ago
    I suspect the most vile and graphic content was confidently classified by the AI. The difficult part, where you'd get the most out of human labeling of data, is the grey area where the models diverge or are uncertain.
    • replwoacause 4y ago
      Sorry but did you read the article? There were some clear examples in which the workers were subjected to this content. "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" "Sama delivered OpenAI a sample batch of 1,400 images. Some of those images were categorized as “C4”—OpenAI’s internal label denoting child sexual abuse—according to the document. Also included in the batch were “C3” images (including bestiality, rape, and sexual slavery,) and “V3” images depicting graphic detail of death, violence or serious physical injury, according to the billing document."
  • judge2020 4y ago
    > for next to nothing. The point of the OP comment is that it's not "next to nothing". The cost of living differs from place to place and a small amount of USD can be worth a _lot_ in many developing nations.
  • Mtinie 4y ago
    > These workers were subjected to the most vile and graphic depictions of sexual abuse content imaginable for next to nothing. Let’s imagine an alternative timeline where OpenAI pays $200/hr for this service. At that price point is it still exploitive? Is it ever appropriate or ethical to ask humans to voluntarily subject themselves to traumatic experiences in exchange for compensation? I’m still processing my own thoughts on this topic so I’m curious to learn about other viewpoints.
• langitbiru 4y ago
  Similar theme. https://thefederalist.com/2016/05/18/beyonces-use-of-sweatshops-does-more-for-the-worlds-poor-than-you-ever-will/ https://thefederalist.com/2016/05/18/beyonces-use-of-sweatsh...
  • edgyquant 4y ago
    What an idiotic and condescending title that article has.
• kuboble 4y ago
  I also think it is probably good. Similarly when I was born in 1980's in Poland my father's salary was roughly 0.1$/hrs. My first job in 1999 paid me less than 2$/hrs. If any American company would be allowed to hire pepole in Poland in 1980 for 1$/hr people would pay bribes to get this job even if it was a humiliating, damaging, life-shortening physical labor. Why Poland got richer after 1990 is partly that we allowed western companies to buy cheap polish labor. The labor was good enough that the companies started competing for it and long story short now the salaries aren't 5% of western but depending on the sector maybe 20%-50%.
  • Tade0 4y ago
    I was surprised to note that at least in IT and comparing to e.g. the UK, that last figure is closer to 70% nowadays. Go to southern EU and you'll see numbers which are either very familiar or... actually lower. Weird times. I wonder when will this growth in salaries stabilise?
    • ricardobayes 4y ago
      Yeah, in eastern EU salaries are not as low as they used to be, anyone with 3-4 years of experience now expects around 3.5-4k€ a month, which in my experience is not that far off of UK salaries.
      • aiilns 4y ago
        Not so in Greece. Salaries are way lower than 3,5-4k per month. Doctors, for example, in public hospitals get around 2k per month and the consultants maybe around 2,5-3k.
        • tasuki 4y ago
          I believe that when ricardobayes said "anyone with 3-4 years of experience" they really meant "anyone in our industry". In my part of Eastern Europe, 2.5k EUR is a very good salary, but software devs earn way more.
      • 4y ago
• yawboakye 4y ago
  fellow african here, with a few questions. could the average income in kenya be around $1.25 because companies decide to pay abysmally? or the people don't merit any higher? would openai be offending the kenyans if they paid them, say, $5/hour? i think this is the question you should grapple with. openai will be selling this tech around the world, and i wonder if these $2/hr workers can afford it at all. would they, or their loved ones, be able to enjoy produce of their labor?
  • charlieyu1 4y ago
    Paying too high can often lead to more extortion. There are people who worked as domestic helpers from Philippines or Indonesia at other countries. They are paid about US$500 a month, which is 5-10x of average salary in their home country. The bad news is that you would need take huge loan, with multiple family members as guaranteers, to pay for the “training fees”.
  • bayesian_horse 4y ago
    Look for "Nash equilibrium". Game theory makes it really hard for all companies in a free market to conspire to keep wages down. Can they conspire to a small degree? Certainly, probably disguised as a cultural or traditional bias. Employers don't pay $5 per hour because they wouldn't make a profit either.
    • pretendscholar 4y ago
      That's a theory that only models certain market conditions. In practice there is an information asymmetry (contrary to the presuppositions of the Nash Equilibrium) and often the employer side has a small number of companies so coordination is easier. Check out this settlement from the 2000s in Silicon Valley[1]. This involves highly desired, well educated employees so imagine how it is in other fields. In my own experience I've had several prospective employers at conferences say that they were interested in poaching me but mentioned that they were wary to start a poaching war. They knew the CEO of my company and were conscious of the fact that he would likely make an effort to respond in kind. The Nash Equilibrium is an interesting concept but reality is complex and messy. [1] https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon-valley/ https://equitablegrowth.org/aftermath-wage-collusion-silicon...
• dekhn 4y ago
  it's common in the US to use US-dollars (and the magnitude expectations around) them when you want to imply somebody is making a tiny salary in another country with a completely different economy. How much does rice cost? Beans? Other subsistence food? If it's all cheaper than the US, then not pointing that out (or showing how a wage compares to the average for a country), it's misleading journalism.
  • HWR_14 4y ago
    That's what PPP is for. For Kenya, I think it's around 2.8, so that would be the equivalent of $5.6 in the US. Of course, PPP doesn't constrain itself to subsistence food.
• alex_young 4y ago
  TFA: “at the time these workers were employed the minimum wage for a receptionist in Nairobi was $1.52 per hour.” Also, they were labeling graphic and illegal (in the US) content including child porn. Seems like paying them around the minimum wage for a receptionist is way way too low to me.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    Minimum wage should never be a benchmark; if someone is paid minimum wage, their employer would pay them less if they were allowed to. Which makes $2 a RELATIVELY better wage, however for the work - basically content filtering through the worst of the internet - there should be a higher compensation and psychological help available. In this case, if Facebook and other online services had it available, they would have been better off reusing what they already developed for their side of content filtering. I want to believe 99% of bad content is already automatically filtered out, and anything that comes through and flagged by content moderators fed back into the systems that automate the process.
  • __derek__ 4y ago
    Folks are also pinning to the top of the range: > The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance.
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• sischoel 4y ago
  When one talks about the average income, does that average only consider people that work? Otherwise, in countries with a high rate of unemployment, I would imagine that a single salary might have to feed the whole extended family, so that one needs to have a salary that is much higher than then average income to be sustainable.
• SkyBelow 4y ago
  Is something deemed bad in one place acceptable in another if it isn't as bad as the alternatives? I could give numerous examples where this is not the case. So assuming we will be consistent in what we consider acceptable or wrong, what then is the deciding factor?
• AlbertCory 4y ago
  Oddly enough, my post this week https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads includes a section about Google hiring Americans to do vaguely similar work, at $15/hour. I say "vaguely" because I don't think my cousin Missy had much racist or sexual content to deal with; at least that wasn't the whole point of the job like the Sama example. Some of you may have heard this story before. The big company uses a small company to be insulated from the legal complications of hiring. That figured into the story: Google claimed they couldn't fix an obvious inequity, and HR told them to try harder. Missy got paid. (In case you're wondering, that's not a fake name. I showed this to her beforehand, and she said it was fine.)
• bannedbybros 4y ago
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• bmitc 4y ago
  But are the companies / people in Kenya paying that $1.25 average because they can’t afford to pay more? OpenAI can afford to pay more, but they’re just taking advantage of a less robust economy. Just because someone benefits from something doesn’t mean they aren’t being taken advantage of.
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  • pontilanda 4y ago
    The point of bringing jobs to Kenya is that they can pay less. If you don't see that as a benefit, why should I, a business, go to the trouble of working with a Kenyan company rather than just do it locally? I could pay a Kenyan $17 an hour, or I could pay a Kansan instead and get US government benefits. The same applies at every payment level. Your logic fails the moment you realize that not every person/worker on earth is equal. Insisting on this sort of articles just goes to show how sheltered these offended people are. I live in the third world and I know people who are thankful to Coca Cola for their "$2 wages."
    • absrd 4y ago
      Do you think then, that they deserve to be mentally scarred without any support and paid less than the minimum wage for a receptionist, on the basis that they are not "equal" to us?
  • blagie 4y ago
    Why do you think Kenya's economy is any less robust? The per-capita GDP has increased fivefold in the past two decades. It's a fraction of the income level of the US, but it's a robust, dynamic, and growing economy. (And I think most of what you wrote is based on similar stereotypes)
    • bmitc 4y ago
      Robust was probably the wrong word, but I couldn’t capture the right word. But notice I did say “less”. What stereotypes?
• pastacacioepepe 4y ago
  That's not the point. Could OpenAI have afforded it if they had to pay first-world wages? Probably not. What kind of business model is one that relies on exploitation of extreme poverty in order to succeed?
  • yoavm 4y ago
    > What kind of business model is one that relies on exploitation of extreme poverty in order to succeed? that's a very good question, but asking it as if it is a problem of OpenAI and not a problem of literally all of our economy sounds a little strange to me.
• newlogicblock 4y ago
  Created an account just to disagree with this. I’m sorry but this is a totally backwards attitude. We need to get to a place where the labor of human beings has a globally defined fair minimum wage. It’s outrageous to me seeing the conditions at Foxconn where young college age children spend decades sitting on a production line doing skilled labor for a fraction of the US minimum wage in order to feed their families, where if they were compensated fairly they could spend that extra time getting an education to escape poverty. There’s no way to slice that that isn’t exploitation and the arguments supporting this won’t age well. It’s right next to slavery, it’s a high offense and we need to call it out bigtime and that we don’t really defines a low point in our moral stance. Because tomorrow we might just find that we are no longer at the top of the food chain and that generation are going to remember how we exploited their poverty to steal their time, keep them poor and keep them subservient.
  • ninjagoo 4y ago
    You are right - equal pay for equal work is an easy concept to understand - it is basic fairness. Instead, Africans are played off against local labor groups and it leads to structural imbalances like women still being paid only 82 cents on the $. And folks go around ridiculing equal-pay advocates as "social justice warriors in SF or NY" or "self-anointed do-gooders"!
  • zajio1am 4y ago
    > We need to get to a place where the labor of human beings has a globally defined fair minimum wage That is just economic nonsense. Labor productivity of economy depends on utilization of capital and ideas in that economy and it is pretty hard to increase. Average wage per hour in that economy cannot be higher than average productivity per hour. If you set minimal wage higher than its productivity, then you just destroyed almost all legal employment and forced everyone to grey economy or subsistence agriculture.
    • newlogicblock 4y ago
      It’s not nonsense to pay a fair wage. It’s basic human decency. Actually, it’s a sacred obligation. If someone gives you some of their time - literally a slice of their living experience, to help you build your wealth then you need to compensate them fairly. It’s not complicated, not at all. I’d like a detailed explanation as to why you think a young skilled worker in China deserves less than an American performing the same task. Explain it to me like you would face to face with a Foxconn worker over coffee after a 10 hour shift on the production line. Explain that economic nonsense like I’m five
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 4y ago
  Additionally, Time is reporting the after tax wages, which seems motivated.
• mola 4y ago
  It's good, but most of the wealth of this labor will not go to Kenya, and it'll be huge. So in that perspective not so great.