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Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI
- oefrha 3y agoI wonder if executives of companies using mturk-like humans to moderate/classify vile content should be compelled to do the same moderation/classification work themselves for an hour a month. Of course it’s highly unlikely to actually compel them to do this through legislation, but it’s an interesting thought.
- mcpackieh 3y agoSounds like a good way to wash out the executives who aren't psychopaths, while those who are would pass with flying colors.
- version_five 3y agoWhat would this achieve?
- capableweb 3y agoThat has about as high success rate to go through as forcing various CEOs/owners of companies to do the "lowest" work in their company.
- letmevoteplease 3y agoReal imagery is one thing but it's hard for me to imagine being traumatized by classifying fictional content, especially text. Getting paid only a few dollars an hour might be painful, though.
- capableweb 3y agoWho knows what kind of texts people share though. Granted, you should not be a content moderator if you don't hold the same view as you expressed above, but I have a feeling a lot of these people weren't prepared at all for what people shared with OpenAI, and just got the job for the (relatively) high pay. But humans can be fucking terrible beings. I could imagine they shared all types of content they had no idea would be read by another human, like confessions of past events and such.
- frandroid 3y agoSure, but the CEOs are already psychopaths, so they would say "see, I can do this sick work too, get back to it!!"
- TekMol 3y agoWhy were human data labelers involved in the creation of ChatGPT? I thought the approach was to let the neural network predict the next word in a large corpus of text?
- oefrha 3y agoIf you don’t classify content that should be filtered out you quickly end up with a Microsoft Tay-like fiasco.
- spott 3y agoRlhf has a human labeling component: given two outputs to the same prompt, which one is better?
- mlinhares 3y agoYou need people to evaluate the answers to improve the output and adjust the weights, there is a lot of manual labor involved at training every single one of these models, it’s not just magic.
- famouswaffles 3y agoThere doesn't have to be manual labor. Anthropic (the Claude Models) use reinforcement learning from AI feedback (dubbed Constitutional AI) and it works great too.
- version_five 3y agoI don't know the scope of OpenAIs data cleaning or RLHF efforts. But I'd guess this is a big part of what's made them the leader. It's one thing to train an LLM on a big text corpus, as researchers do. It's another to actually wade into it and do the curation to turn it into a real product. I know there are public instruction datasets out there, but my guess is OpenAI has put a lot of money into getting cleaner data and more supervised / feedback data. Doing that extra work is the kind if thing that wins when building a product.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
- greenhearth 3y agoThis shit's not worth it.
- SomethingNew2 3y agoBased on the information in the article these complaints were raised after the contract was ended. Why not refuse the work or raise the complaint at the time? The article also mentions the work was worse than they thought, but indicates they were told what the work entailed before starting it. Also the primary person being quoted lost his wife and family, and blames this work on why he lost his wife. Anyone who has been in a relationship knows singular reasons are an oversimplification of a complicated relationship.
- version_five 3y agoIt's pretty obviously an unpleasant job, but it does seem like they cherry picked a disgruntled former employee for the story. The jobs pay above average wages, it would be interesting to know the overall sentiment of the people that work there as opposed to just seeing anecdotes designed to provoke outrage. Would people rather that money just didnt go into the Kenyan economy?
- hgsgm 3y agoIt's activism, not journalism. The purpose is to persuade, not inform.
- frandroid 3y agoHave you not ever had a shitty job that you could not afford to quit because there was no other work at comparable salary available to you? They talk about how they specifically targeted new graduates. The economy in Kenya is not exactly Silicon Valley.
- dagaci 3y agoHindsight is a great thing; I would assume that psychological damage accumulates. The question you are asking the man who lost his wife was: “Didn’t you know that constantly reading horrific texts, and looking at horrific images would wreck your mind. You should have known before you started?!” This is just a petition for the Kenyan government to investigate. Kenyan government may need to apply some age restriction, and require that staff be filtered by stability before the start reviewing horrible materials” "texts, and some images, many depicting graphic scenes of violence, self-harm, murder, rape, necrophilia, child abuse, bestiality and incest"
- belval 3y ago> Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson. I don't like how journalists never adjust the salary when doing those conversions. Yes $1.46 in the US sounds like the most abdject poverty, but Kenya is not the US. The minimum salary in Kenya is $1.05 so even their lower bound is 39% higher than the minimum salary with their upper bound being 358% higher. For job that while psychologically scarring for some, does not require any education aside from being able to read, that really doesn't seem that bad.
- JKCalhoun 3y agoI don't think anyone would dispute that these are not decent wages in Kenya. What is embarrassing is that the corporation seeks places where wages (relative to western wages) are this low (for what also amounts to the bullshit work).
- AYBABTME 3y agoWhat's embarrassing about it? Don't you shop around when you need to hire a contractor or buy a car?
- JKCalhoun 3y agoBuying/paying local helps my local economy.
- AYBABTME 3y agoI think there's times where this makes sense and times where it doesn't. Your local economy is probably better served by being paid to do something else. They probably have a comparative advantage at doing another activity. You'd be better off paying into your local economy where it makes strategic sense. We're not talking about exporting critical manufacturing skills here. We're talking about doing a crappy job that's only worth doing and paying for if it's dirt cheap.
- 3y ago
- king_magic 3y agoThey are entirely free to not do labeling work.
- hgsgm 3y agoThey can't get their time and innocence back.
- king_magic 3y agoSo everyone’s a victim now, eh?
- Kiro 3y agoThis was not a thing before Western media tried to create a narrative. After that Kenyans saw the opportunity and started feeding it. I don't blame them.
- mercurialsolo 3y agoAny form of repeated exposure to content or propaganda is bound to have a lasting impact on both our cognition as well as memory. This is how we are wired. The key is to ensure we are able to draw boundaries - a key reason why we are all talk about social feed / content moderation. The challenge is when you can afford to pay and get someone else to do it - is it your problem and do you care if it affects someone else. Do corporations bear responsibility for affecting people who they employ and put into severe conditions which they are aware have long lasting impact?
- seydor 3y agoThe anglosphere is vast though
- dstroot 3y agoWhat is stopping us from creating a "supervisory AI" that understands the difference between good content and bad content and having it perform the role of these humans? More broadly speaking training and overseeing a sufficiently advanced AI seems like it could only be done effectively by another AI. The human oversight could be temporarily redirected to validating the supervisory AI.
- pledgist 3y ago[dead]
- avgcorrection 3y agoHumans having to do drudgery in service of AI is not exactly the vision I was presented.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- poisonborz 3y agoSomebody once told me "yeah, without some slavery, THAT also wouldn't work", and I see it so often in products and concepts around us day by day. This isn't about the income gap. It's extracting work from a certain class for pennies, and create immense wealth from it on the other side of the globe without those people even knowing what it is about, let alone take part or benefit from it long term. After centuries what we achieved is more sustainable, scaleable slavery.
- version_five 3y agoYeah outsourcing is terrible for the countries being outsourced to https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
- spicymapotofu 3y agoSo China's GDP is a good measure for Kenyan well-being?
- onewheeltom 3y agoHow much pay is worth getting PTSD?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]