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The African workers driving the AI revolution, for about a dollar an hour
- mthld 2y ago[flagged]
- llm_trw 2y agoWould you be happier if we were exploiting Eastern Europeans instead?
- duneisagoodbook 2y agoThis is a false dichotomy, gross exploitation does not need to present.
- sdfgtr 2y agoI suspect the answer is yes.
- _nsme 2y agoThis couldn’t happen because of minimum wages. And yes I would be happy if white people would stop colonizing every piece of land and people they can find to fiddle with their little capitalist toys.
- llm_trw 2y ago>And yes I would be happy if white people would stop colonizing every piece of land and people they can find to fiddle with their little capitalist toys. May I suggest reading a history book on the Muslim conquest of the Balkans and Iberia? If not for Muslim colonialism Spain and Austria would have never had to become world powers to survive.
- butyo 2y ago[dead]
- victor106 2y agoAs bad as the wages might seem to someone making 1000x this, it still might be a decent salary for someone living in abject poverty and also offers the possibility that their services become more in demand as AI takes over our world which allows them to demand higher wages. Much earlier in my life I was the one to be negative on capitalism but after experiencing this process first hand I am a supporter of it. Although there are many situations where it hasn't delivered the intended benefits but in aggregate I would bet that it has.
- batch12 2y ago> I am ashamed of being part of the tech industry. Unlike these folks, you don't have to be. Quit.
- mthld 2y agoIt’s planned. I’ll do something actually useful for people, work in medical/social care or maybe go back to farming (what my family has been doing since generations). Feeding people with something else than marketing bullshit to their brain, feeding them something they can eat.
- batch12 2y agoSounds like an admirable goal. I wish you luck.
- mthld 2y agoThanks a lot. I’ll probably earn less money, but waking up and getting out of bed every morning will be much more meaningful.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoFarmers exploit workers all the time, probably even more so than the tech world. And, notably I think, the expectation has people doing backbreaking labor in the middle of a shapeless field, instead of sitting in an air conditioning room watching videos and occasionally typing things.
- _nsme 2y agoWell. My dude. There are definitely different kind of farming. And in my family case, it has always been a small business, growing vegetables and fruits, selling products locally and fair compensation for the worker. Not every farmer has to be a capitalist piece of shit you know.
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- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- _def 2y ago[flagged]
- teractiveodular 2y ago> Nobody ever leaves the BPO willingly – there’s nothing else to do. She sees her ex-colleagues when she’s on her way to work, hawking vegetables on the market or trying to sell popcorn by the side of the road. If there were other opportunities, people would seize them. She just has to keep her head down, hit her targets, and make sure that whatever happens, she doesn’t get laid off. And this is the kicker: it's all very well for us to wring our hands about how their conditions could be better, but people are voluntarily choosing to do jobs like this because it's still better than the alternatives. Staring at video footage for 8 hours a day to get paid a dollar an hour sucks, but it sucks less than walking around in a traffic jam in the African sun, trying to hawk bags of popcorn to drivers and constantly risking getting run over with no certainty of getting paid.
- coffeebeqn 2y agoI’m also not sure what’s the problem. We’ve been doing globalization for decades and it sounds like they pay market rate for office jobs where not many (office) jobs exist. Manufacturing has been much worse of a work environment and we seem to have gotten over that collectively
- mthld 2y agoYeah. Look at all the benefits of colonization in African countries. Look at the great job we are doing. Giving them money to alienate themselves looking at the shit we produce. Such a great advancement for humanity. Thanks lord for bringing civilization to the savages
- infecto 2y agoNo doubt the impact of Europe on Africa has hurt but are brining jobs to Africa a bad thing? At this point Africa probably receives more harm from its own residents than outside influences. Nobody said anything about savages. Please don’t bring negativity into a conversation.
- solveit 2y agoYour rhetoric falls flat against any infant mortality chart. > alienate themselves Sounds like a first-world problem to me.
- infecto 2y agoSounds like a decent wage for that part of the world. Looks like on the medium-high end folks are making $600 a month there. Not sure how many hours worked but conservatively towards the high end that works out to $3-4 an hour.
- MuffinFlavored 2y agoWhat does $600/mo afford people over there that they can't get with $300/mo, $150/mo, $75/mo, etc?
- codeforafrica 2y agoA bigger house with tap water, indoor plumbing and electricity, a fridge, and maybe even a stove or a washing machine. Oh, and they can send their kids to a better school.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- codeforafrica 2y agoI think it's actually a bad idea to pay much more than that. If you do then local companies can no longer compete for these workers because they could not afford them, and once used to a high salary the workers would not want to work for less.
- Lerc 2y agoThe article says $200 a month for the AI annotation job in Uganda. Median income appears to be $70(2012 data, so maybe now $100 after inflation)
- Havoc 2y agoMinimum wage is 120 so at normal hours 160 is above but also not massively
- alephnerd 2y agoThe average monthly HOUSEHOLD income in Kenya is ~$160/mo and ~$250/mo in Nairobi [0]. Uganda is even poorer than Kenya. $1 per hour is around market rate for this kind of a role (some kind of college education). This kind of BPO work is how Kenya (and Uganda - they're using the same model) graduate up the services ladder. Edit: these are employees in a Tier 4 city in Uganda. $200/mo is a great salary in a rural town like Gulu. [0] - https://reall.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Understanding-Household-Incomes_Kenya_12Dec22.pdf https://reall.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Understanding-H...
- exabrial 2y agoWhy not just pay Unionized American Workers?
- kelnos 2y agoTired of the "shock" headlines like this: a dollar an hour isn't good or bad unless you know the context and local cost of living. Seems like that's a decent wage for those parts of the world? The actually objectionable bit is that these jobs traumatize people over time, and desensitize them to the disturbing content they watch as a part of the job. Would I choose this over spending my day out in the heat, trying to sell food, snacks, or other wares, subject to the risk of pedestrian accidents or violent theft? Maybe? Ideally there could just be better jobs available all around, but some people who live there might consider this at least somewhat better than some of the alternative jobs they'd otherwise be working. Our current way of building models requires a large training data set that is already tagged/classified by humans. Unless the technology somehow improves so this is no longer necessary, these jobs are necessary. One bright spot is that once these models are trained, then humans can be out of the loop, which is certainly better than not having the models at all, and having to employ people, in perpetuity, to watch all of this content and directly make moderation decisions. But perhaps the question we should be asking is: should we just completely do without, and never subject people to these kinds of jobs, no matter what the purpose? Maybe video, photo, etc. sharing on this scale just shouldn't exist if we have to put humans through miserable work in order to do moderation. But I don't really see this changing. So if we continue to employ people to train our AI models, can we get to a point where our future models can be used to bootstrap/train more sophisticated models, without the need for further human classification of the training data?
- baggy_trough 2y agoIf we did without and these jobs went away, those people would be worse off. So no.
- deadbolt 2y agoYeah there's no way to improve these people's lives without subjecting them to hours and hours of watching the worst content imaginable /s
- baggy_trough 2y ago
- worstspotgain 2y agoSounds like the type of labor-intensive scheme that suits a developing economy. If labor is abundant and capital is scarce, what you don't want are capital-intensive jobs (e.g. semiconductor fab operator) even if the wage is 100x higher. Once everyone is employed, the bidding will begin and wages will rise. [1] Training AI is also way better than undermining Western democracy... [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-uncovers-russian-led-troll-network-based-in-west-africa https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mikae1 2y ago> Sounds like the type of labor-intensive scheme that suits a developing economy. Much of this work does not suit any living human. https://www.ft.com/content/ef42e78f-e578-450b-9e43-36fbd1e20d01 https://www.ft.com/content/ef42e78f-e578-450b-9e43-36fbd1e20... https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-training-human-toll-content-moderator-meta-openai https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbo...
- worstspotgain 2y agoThe FT link is paywalled, the other articles just echo the article at the top. There's a worker who apparently filed the equivalent of a wrongful termination suit in Kenya. There are many of those every day in the developed world too, and it may well be meritorious. He claims he was scarred by the content he had to look at, but Americans review objectionable social media content too (or at least used to.) Since these workers are not indentured serfs, we should generally rely on their ability to switch jobs. To me, this looks like some reporters hounding in on anything that smacks of big-bad-wolf AI. As for it being work that doesn't suit any living human, it seems a bit hyperbolic. Maybe you've been less exposed to reports of what life is like in the developing world than I have? Here's something that was on PBS the other day: https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/09/29/philippines-children-risk-death-dig-and-dive-gold https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/09/29/philippines-children-ris... Of course it's not a company in the developed world that commissions this, but everyone knows whose necklaces the gold is ending up in. I think we should avoid knee-jerk reactions against AI, which arguably has more potential to help the developing world than anything since electricity, and maybe look more into who benefits if AI is held back.
- radarsat1 2y agoI find it a bit odd how this article conflates content moderation for social network with AI training. Of course there is a relationship there but these are not the same thing. The article gives lots of examples of trauma caused by content moderation and then blames it on the needs of AI. If anything, if we could satisfactorily train an AI for content moderation then humans wouldn't need to be in the loop (as much) so it's a weird thing to just put these ideas together like that, and is clearly just trying to feed the current zeitgeist of "AI bad".
- j45 2y agoIs it odd? AI being trained for content moderation for social media... Social media seems to be downstream from training AI to recognize and categorize content.
- radarsat1 2y agoSure but my point is that you could write exactly the same article without mentioning AI at all, since the majority of examples are about content moderation for social media. Meanwhile the only connection to AI is that it might provide a potential reduction in the need for this. So what is odd to me is positioning this as the purpose being for feeding the ever hungry data needs of evil algorithms, because as far as I can tell without those algorithms these jobs would still exist and would be worse.
- j45 2y agoHmm. Isn’t “AI” is an algorithm too? Writing about training a content moderation AI by humans marking metadata on the content for AI seems to be throughout the article. “Might” provide a potential reduction feels like a stretch. LLMs literally are decent at receiving input and prompting “tell me about this”. There is a less than desirable human price being paid to encode content to train an algorithm. Maybe if it was done by someone with tech skills they could reduce it.. instead, for now, it appears to be outsourced to traumatize people who don’t have the health support and salaries to build the AI to begin with. Someone is choosing to send this work far, far, away to a much more vulnerable population, and maybe in time it doesn’t have to be that way. If any group is capable to make a difference in reducing any questions about this approach it’s the most capable in the tech, not the least. Content recognition is something AI done before the current wave of AI pretty well. If anything this might boost things like OpenCV. Training a content moderation AI is meant to do what social media hasn’t been able to do, moderate content in large ways other than using humans. AI a popular word right now in zeitgeist, it doesn’t meant it’s beyond being connected to everything that already exists, when it’s based on existing knowledge and practices.
- IG_Semmelweiss 2y agoThe 1st two paragraphs of the article are brutal. A surreal way to start a narrative. Is that even real ? Sounds like it belongs in a movie script.
- alephnerd 2y agoIt's an excerpt from a book. A lot of Guardian "articles" are just excerpts like this or op-eds. They know their market.
- j45 2y agoIt's real. Maybe it's surreal in part because it's so far removed from the end users receiving the benefits.
- Lerc 2y agoIt certainly doesn't portray a typical or common occurrence. It's depicting a traumatic situation akin to an emergency worker having to deal with a loved one as a patient. This does happen. It is also rare, but mostly unavoidable because it can't be predicted. The best that can be offered is support for traumatized people. The support the article says was offered was clearly insufficient, but after a sensationalized opening such as that, I end up doubting the credibility of the article as a whole. Worker welfare is an important issue, world-wide. I feel like books like the one this article comes from are just finding a new way to exploit these people.
- foobarbecue 2y agoYeah, I don't understand how this would happen. These moderators are viewing stuff from all over the world, right? So how would this one person be assigned stuff from her own neighborhood -- not just one item, but many? It seems almost impossible, unless for some reason they're assigning people stuff from their areas.
- dfadsadsf 2y agoI worked on tooling and organization of those queues for several companies so I am very familiar with the topic. This article is a bit misleading and contains mostly half-truths - Queues with gore and violations pay more than regular queue. You can be paid $X/hour for marking traffic lanes or roughly $1.5-1.8X for looking at somebody getting killed. This is personal choice and some people handle it better than others. If you have high empathy, you should absolutely not do it. On the other hand 5% of population are psychopaths with inhibited empathy and they do not care. This is similar to real life jobs - what you see in queues is not that different from what police see day to day in downtown SF or South Chicago. - Same goes for sexually-explicit/porn queues. If you are 18 year old male you should absolutely not do them - it will fuck up your sexuality (similar to watching porn 8 hours/day). You will also burn out in a couple weeks anyway. The most success we saw was with 50+ year old women working from home - some worked on those queues for years. - From the article you will notice that Africans worked on African countries queues/moderation - so it's not even imperialism or whatever where they worked on rating rich-countries content. They rated their fellow Africans. - Africa is not that big in content moderation. Reliable coachable people are hard to find and infrastructure is not great. Salaries are also pretty high - I am not sure where they find workers for $1/hour but we paid significantly more. India does way more moderation, people are more reliable and overall it's much easier to work with Indian BPO.
- xigoi 2y ago> On the other hand 5% of population are psychopaths with inhibited empathy and they do not care. Do you want psychopaths to be the ones to determine what content is too violent?
- dfadsadsf 2y agoGuidelines are written by product, legal, privacy, comms, policy and other folks in HQ - raters (psychopath or not) do not really influence them. Guidelines in my experience suffer from "design by committee" syndrome but everyone working on them is pretty empathetic and genuinely tries to do best inside constraints. Acceptable/Unacceptable violence is clearly defined in guidelines with examples - no moral judgement from rater is required. On raters - they are doing pretty mechanical work and we generally do robust quality checks. Some % of tasks are randomly sent to two raters and if there is disagreement, task is sent to auditor. Raters with high disagreement rate with auditor are coached and if disagreement rate contienues to be high, they are fired. Overall quality is controlled by using "golden set" - tasks that have "right" answer decided by HQ. We look at disagreement between raters and right answer. There are other ways to control for quality - this is all pretty standard and everyone is doing the same things. Does not really matter if rater is phychopath or not if he can follow guidelines.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> This particular video was of a fatal car crash. An uncle of mine died in a car crash, in the late 80s / early 90s. The first thing my father did was drive for hours, to the place where the crash happened, and film. He then went and filmed the car wreck with its blood stains and grass stuck between the tires and the rims. A 230 km/h // 140 mph+ crash: driver lost control. And although he could barely speak while filming he warned us in the video that this was what would happen to us if we were to act like idiots on the road. And he, of course, forced us to watch that vid. Immediately and then a few more times at regular intervals months/years later. Best road safety lesson we ever got. Every single person I ever crossed on the road in my life can thank my father for filming and forcing me to watch that vid. At times there are very smart families who do allow the publication of videos of crashes where a family member died and say it's to act as a warning as to what may happen when you drive drunk/intoxicated/crazy. It should be outlawed that families may decide that these vids are not publishable. It happened on public roads: it should be public material, as a warning to the public. That these are not allowed on social media is criminal for these vids are the best lessons kids / teenagers can ever get when it comes to road safety. And it is delusional to think that kids/teenagers watch that for morbid reasons: they watch such vids because their survival instinct want to make sense of what's happening. "If you act like that, you'll kill people and/or die" is quite the lesson.
- sodality2 2y agoThis isn’t a crazy notion. My high school, as well as probably thousands of others, staged a crash and EMS rescue to have us all realize the danger of driving impaired. The difference is it was in a monitored setting - I don’t think young children should be exposed to this on an app that everyone is using, without the comfort of their parents. Even in your example, your father showed it to you. But watching extremely graphically violent videos from a young age with zero healthy avenues to process it is a recipe for disaster.
- randerson 2y agoI've learned a lot from watching non-fatal accidents and close calls on /r/IdiotsInCars. I'm not sure I'd be better off if these were graphic or of someone I know. What maddens me about social media is that they're OK hosting videos of their users driving recklessly on public roads and getting away with it. It normalizes dangerous driving, even glorifies it since these idiots attract millions of followers. Instagram for example doesn't even have a category to report this content.
- rldjbpin 2y agosee related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40623629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40623629 (Cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English from the same site; 98 comments)
- exabrial 2y agoGood thing all of these AI Companies renamed their "master" branches to "main", that really solved the problem here of inequality.