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> But around 15 years ago, before the proliferation of gig work, deep learning systems were considered merely an academic curiosity, confined to a few intereste
by AlbertCory 4y ago
> But around 15 years ago, before the proliferation of gig work, deep learning systems were considered merely an academic curiosity, confined to a few interested researchers.
Um, no. Google was using machine learning more than 15 years ago, notably in the SmartASS system that predicts whether someone will click on an ad [1]. I got my cousin Missy a gig (at $15 an hour) rating ads and search results.
This story is hardly a claim of humane treatment of gig workers, I should note. I intervened and got her treated fairly.
> Companies make sure to hire people from poor and underserved communities, such as refugees, incarcerated people and others with few job options, often hiring them through third party firms as contractors rather than as full time employees.
Citations, please. A rater who is many standard deviations away from the mean is extremely undesirable. You want their judgments to be representative of the population.
If you want to design something that appeals to Americans, you want American raters. Since the US is by far the largest consumer of Internet services, it stands to reason most raters of "quality" will need to be from the US.
If you just want to know if an image contains objectionable content, then yes, you could use Third World employees.
[1] https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/working-at-google-ads
- zhte415 4y ago> A rater who is many standard deviations away from the mean is extremely undesirable. You want their judgments to be representative of the population. An excellent point.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tristor 4y agoThese “journalists” see someone training image classifiers using Mechanical Turk, which awards a wage in excess of the local economy in the third world, and imagine to themselves this is how all models get trained because they don’t understand ML, they don’t understand market segmentation, and generally don’t understand technology or business.
- Xelynega 4y agoI don't see what there is to understand. Any 'ai' model right now requires classified data to train. It takes human work to classify data. Human work is cheaper in some places than others, so companies in expensive places exploit the situation of poorer places to lower their operating costs. The wage size compared to the local economy doesn't really matter, since the exploitation comes from the difference in costs between the local economy and the local economy of the company. In your reality, how is the data getting classified if not by people whose situation is being exploited?
- cscurmudgeon 4y agoHow is that exploitation?
- Xelynega 4y agoWhy don't US companies pay foreign workers US wages? The answer I come up with is that they chose to hire workers in disadvantaged situations(relative to opportunity and local labour laws) to reduce operating costs. To me, using people in disadvantaged situations to reduce your operating costs is inherently exploitative.
- tristor 4y ago> Why don't US companies pay foreign workers US wages? Why doesn't money grow on trees? Why does inflation exist? Why are some nations wealthy and other nations poor? Why are some nations at different points in their economic, social, civil, and technological development? Why is the sky blue? Are you trolling or do you seriously not understand how fancifully inane this question is?
- cscurmudgeon 4y agoNobody is being forced to work for those companies. Is there any actual evidence of exploitation? If so, are the governments complicit in not acting against them? This is silly. Rents and product costs are low too in those countries. Are consumers exploiting business owners there by this logic?