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Underage workers are training AI
- User3456335 3y ago"even a nude body from a Renaissance-style painting." Well, if that was the worst they had to see... At that age (15), I was studying these paintings in school. How is this problematic?
- pjscott 3y agoThis is a weird article. It starts with an anecdote about someone extremely poor who really needs some money, and how that person found a job with flexible hours and comfortable working conditions which paid relatively well. And then the article acts like this is obviously a horrible scandal that must be stopped. Even if the allegations of "traumatizing content" are true and not exaggerated cherry-picking, shouldn't the decisions here be made by the people actually involved? When well-meaning, well-fed people take away their choices (and income), this isn't exactly doing them a favor.
- jstarfish 3y agoThat's the moral dilemma. In a just world, people wouldn't have to sell their bodies or break their minds in order to eat. But we don't live in a just world, so until we do, denying them opportunities over "ethics" is condemning them to worse treatment elsewhere-- or starvation. Hungry people don't care about the opinions of fat academics pontificating about Ethics.
- mistrial9 3y agogreat emotional appeal - yet there is more than enough food in a lot of the world, for the last fifty years, and much longer. Starving people are somehow close by warring people, want to bet? It is problems of Empire, how to transmit $2USD to the edges while pulling the real control to the center. young workers in dire conditions are generally docile and replaceable, right?
- okdood64 3y agoOutrage porn. Nothing new.
- LtWorf 3y agoSend your own kids to watch photos of dicks and decide if they are dicks or not.
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- mattdeboard 3y agoYour critique of the article is sensible to a point. But your analysis is incomplete. I’m gonna lay out a few predicates hopefully we can all agree on as true, then get to my point. First, hopefully you can agree that, fundamentally, the company paying these child workers is trading money for labor. (This shouldn’t be controversial, it’s a fact of labor markets.) Second, the companies paying these children are extracting value from their labor greater than what they are paying the child laborers. Third, the employers chose laborers located “predominantly … in East Africa, Venezuela, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines” for this work because that’s where they can pay the least in labor costs while still extracting value. Fourth, keeping labor costs as low as possible while extracting maximum value is the most rational course of action. Fifth, and finally, it is very rational for children to seek out & undertake this work — to exchange their labor for money — given the economics of their lives. With these predicates laid out, my point: The reason your analysis doesn’t lead you to thinking this is a raw deal for the children involved is because in a sense, it’s not. Given the economics of their lives, this is, relatively speaking, a good deal. The rawness of the deal only becomes apparent when we start to inspect why material conditions are such that this deal — trading an hour of labor for $2 to a company serving a multi-billion-dollar market — is enticing to children. In other words, this article, in my analysis, is an opportunity to study and question the system that creates the conditions such that there is a labor market comprising children who are available for exploitation for cheap labor by very rich Western companies.
- pjscott 3y agoI'll agree with all of 1–5, and elaborate on #2: > Second, the companies paying these children are extracting value from their labor greater than what they are paying the child laborers. This is always the case with employment, assuming that the employer isn't getting ripped off: when two parties make a voluntary trade, they're both getting something they value more than what they're trading away. -- > In other words, this article, in my analysis, is an opportunity to study and question the system that creates the conditions such that there is a labor market comprising children who are available for exploitation for cheap labor by very rich Western companies. I don't see anything that needs explaining here. Poverty is the default. For almost all of human history we were dirt poor. For almost all of agricultural history we were in a hungry, unpleasant Malthusian equilibrium. The real miracle is that things are getting better. And a big part of why things are getting better is because it's possible for richer countries to 'exploit' cheap labor in poorer countries – and help them escape poverty by doing it. It's amusing how companies keep looking for cheap labor in different countries every few years, because the places that used to have the cheapest labor got wealthier because of those opportunities. I realize that not everybody shares my aesthetics, but personally I see this as beautiful, even if the ground-level details are a bit grungy.
- ben_w 3y agoI have every reason to assume the traumatising content examples are the point of the data classification exercise — I mean, filtering such content is probably the single largest expense of large forums and social media sites, so of course loads of people would want to train an AI to do it for them. As for giving people agency over their working conditions… I don't know — every so often there's an argument about prostitution, where people argue against it because it's dangerous, and then someone points out how all work carries some risk and someone says something about capitalism forcing men to effectively sell their lungs to coal mines which are much more dangerous than women selling their bodies, and everyone gets cross and a few months later there's a similar debate like nobody learned anything.
- brightlancer 3y ago> and everyone gets cross and a few months later there's a similar debate like nobody learned anything. This sums up online discussions for 30+ years. While some folks never learn, there's also a steady stream of new folks who weren't part of the previous conversations and _will_ learn if given the opportunity. (This is the positive side of the Eternal September.)
- morelisp 3y agoThe children yearn for the mines.
- bxguff 3y agothe traumatizing content is a very real part of it, in my experience 'red teaming' LLMs included both reviewing and creating overtly violent, sexual, racist content, via prompt. if you refused the work you got fired. not surprising, but real.
- Throwfi44 3y ago> 15-year-old Hassan... region of Pakistan. That is not underage work in Pakistan! "Respected" jurnalists should bother to do minimal research! I wish I had similar gig, instead of working for 50 cents/hour at building site! > Article 11.3 of the Constitution of Pakistan says " No child below the age of fourteen years shall be engaged in any factory or mine or any other hazardous employment. https://paycheck.pk/labour-laws/fair-treatment/minors-and-youth https://paycheck.pk/labour-laws/fair-treatment/minors-and-yo...
- rayiner 3y agoIt’s not underage work in the US either.
- pvg 3y agoThey are using 'underage' as a synonym for 'minor'. The article is not about the legality of employment.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoThey are using “underage” because it baits your clicks. The article isn’t about a real problem, the problem it was trying to solve is how to keep their employees paid.
- rayiner 3y ago“Underage” means the person is too young to do the work, whether in a legal or moral sense. A 15 year old doing computer work is neither.
- pvg 3y ago"Underage" doesn't really mean just that, it's ambiguous and arguably misused in this context. A 15 year old doing computer work is neither. That's just your own unrelated gloss on the article. Is this the greatest of title or word choice? Probably not. It's not particularly hard to figure out what it intends to say.
- alphabettsy 3y agoCan’t help but feel like this is an opportunity more than it is exploitation based on the information given.
- ayabee 3y agoI feel the same way. And some of these people work together as a family. I wish they could get paid better.
- mattdeboard 3y agoIt’s both an opportunity and exploitation. The opportunity exists only because this labor pool is composed of laborers who are vulnerable to such exploitation. To me, this article isn’t about whether it’s good or bad for the laborers involved, but an invitation to look at the bigger economic picture, i.e. why their material conditions are such that there are opportunities for children to trade $2 for an hour of their labor.
- 38rudj 3y agoI don't understand your word choice based on other remarks you've made in this thread. You seem to lean into the "exploitation has two meanings" angle to justify the word choice and how the article isn't about whether it's good or bad... But then much like the article you immediately return to obviously judgemental language like "vulnerable". In casual conversation do you talk about your coworkers in terms of vulnerability to exploitation when discussing their amenability to their job? It makes everything else you say come across as insincere.
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- mattdeboard 3y agoI see you created this account STRICTLY to question my sincerity, which is interesting. But setting that aside, I just wanted to say: > obviously judgmental language like “vulnerable” I consider children to be a vulnerable population regardless of what the economics of their lives are like. So therefore, I judge the systems in the world that incentivize capitalizing upon that vulnerability. QED.
- mbrumlow 3y agoI grew up in the US. I have had a W2 sense I was 13. I could not think of anything better that I would have wanted to do when I was 13. I leaned so much and had a ton of fun. The notion that “work” is bad has got to go.
- ctoth 3y agoThe purpose of this article is to be linked in a long Gish Gallop of AI harms (you know the type) and this one is supposed to be under the link "underage workers" so as to give people who skim that future article a sense of outrage, and oh look it has a link so it must be true!
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- kmeisthax 3y agoIf there's one Big Lie in the AI field, it's the idea that the models just "learn things" as if we invented magic that eats raw text and images and poops out intelligence. Not nearly enough attention is paid to the labeling and filtering infrastructure used to produce the datasets, a lot of which is human labor or derivatives thereof[0]. The fact that this labor is being offloaded to third-world kids who know how to steal their parents ID to earn beer money^W^W0.69 bobux is also a scandal, but it's the boring, frustratingly mundane kind that is common to all "gig economy" companies. Surely, not every kid is being permanently damaged by this exploitation, and there's certainly worse exploitation out there, but it's still exploitation. And these AI models aren't AI, they're products of lots of human labeling and filtering. [0] e.g. reward modeling
- fnordpiglet 3y agoI don’t get your point that it’s not AI. Just because the input to the model is curated doesn’t make it either not intelligent or not artificial. Its properties are what they are regardless of the genesis. Assuming the behavior they display is intelligence, I assume also we agree it’s artificial and not naturally emergent. Am I missing something?
- jrpt 3y agoIt’s not a really a “big lie” when they are upfront about RLHF. The H stands for human.
- pardoned_turkey 3y agoI frankly find the idea that we must shield adolescents from any form of work... just pretty bizarre. There are some dangerous jobs out there, and I can perhaps accept the argument that most 15 year olds don't have the agency to sign up for that - although as a matter of practicality, having grown up poor, I know a lot of people who ended up better off working the kinds of jobs that journalists and the regulators now frown upon. You can make abstract arguments about how in a post-scarcity utopia, no person should ever have to work. But we're not there now and you don't get there by preventing people from working before that vision of a 3D-printed, AI-based future can be realized. For now, work is inevitable for most; so what's wrong about being paid a living wage for classifying content in front of your computer on your own schedule? As a teenager, I'd have loved that. And I was exposed to content far more vile than anything this gig could've thrown at me.
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- brightlancer 3y ago> You can make abstract arguments about how in a post-scarcity utopia, no person should ever have to work. But we're not there now and I would argue that either A) developed nations _are_ post-scarcity or B) it's impossible for a society to ever reach post-scarcity. If we strip away all the "necessities" we've added over the past 100, 50, 20 years, and instead focus on what we've long considered basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing), then developed nations are post-scarcity because everyone has access to those necessities -- even someone "homeless" in the US has access to shelter in a real building, though it's only the minimum. If we say that the "necessities" we've added are genuine necessities, then how can we ever reach post-scarcity if we're able to continually redefine what are necessities? In either case, we should focus less on scarcity of "necessities" and more on absolute poverty, which leads to: > you don't get there by preventing people from working before that vision of a 3D-printed, AI-based future can be realized. Abject poverty is the norm, and nations became "developed" through brutal labor, including child labor. We shouldn't be telling people to stay poor because we don't like their working conditions.
- farleykr 3y agoI wasn't sure if I wanted to throw my two cents into this comment section, but here goes... I'm absolutely astounded that anyone is framing the concept of taking advantage of the vulnerable and exposing them to this kind of material for such meager pay as an opportunity for them. This is slave labor and exploitation, regardless of whether or not the person in question is or is not a child by legal classification and whether or not the pay is above average for someone in their situation. It makes me sick to my stomach that we are once again achieving "progress" at the expense of vulnerable people.
- LtWorf 3y agoGiven how most of the users here are silicon valley types… I'm not surprised they are fine with it.
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- jdminhbg 3y agoThis is slavery, regardless of whether or not this is slavery? Ok.
- farleykr 3y agoWhat word would you use to capture the idea of paying poor people or people in refugee camps a dollar an hour to label explicit content for AI? “The nature of the work often feels like digital servitude—but it's a necessity for earning a livelihood.”
- jdminhbg 3y agoIf I were trying to come up with a word for paying people, the first thing I would do is exclude all the words that explicitly mean not paying people.
- farleykr 3y agoGoogle search for “slave labor definition”: labor that is coerced and inadequately rewarded, or the people who perform such labor. We can split hairs and debate semantics but that definition fits my use of the phrase.