5 ms·

The human cost of our AI-driven future

50 points by gmays 2y ago

sdenton4 2y ago
Sure, there's no 'digital savior' (as the article puts it) - these are tools which can often help triage the great majority of 'boring' cases, focusing human attention where it is most-needed. In that sense, they are multipliers for the effectiveness of human labor, which is exactly what you want out of any given technology.
- kevingadd 2y ago
  It gets tricky though. Let's say that 90% of your 'bad posts' are just basic stuff AI can handle, like insults or spam. You deploy an AI to moderate, and it lets you cut your moderation workforce by 80%. Maybe you're a generous person, so you cut by 50% instead and the remaining moderators aren't as overworked anymore. (Nobody's going to actually do this, but hey, let's be idealistic.) Costs are down, things are more efficient. Great! But there's a little problem: Before, 90% of the posts your moderators looked at were mundane stuff. They'd stare at it for a moment, evaluate the context, and go 'yeah this is a death threat, suspend account.' Now all the moderators see is stuff that got past the AI or is hard to classify. Dead bodies, CSAM, racist dogwhistle screeds, or the kind of mentally unhinged multi-paragraph angry rants that get an account shadowbanned on places like HN. Efficiency turns the moderator's job from 'fairly easy with occasional moments of true horror' into 'a nonstop parade of humanity's worst impulses, in front of my face, 40 hours a week'.
  - AIorNot 2y ago
    I don't think the articles point is about auto-moderation of harmful content instead its about being empathetic of the human suffering this work entails and finding ways to treat their contractors as humans instead of 'far off resources' outsourcing this dirty and dingy work to African countries in this way without caring for the 'contractors' is a recipe for de-humanization of people.. https://www.sama.com/our-team https://www.sama.com/our-team their team page is funny reminder of classism and racial disparity in the world white people at the top and black people at the bottom.. lol I know they aren't racially driven and there is real economic value for the contractors as jobs but our current hyper-capitalistic global system is mostly setup to exploit offshore people instead of elevate them the world is what it is..
  - xtreme 2y ago
    Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. AI moderation should easily catch the worst offenders and the most obvious ones. The examples you gave easily stand out from non-offensive content and are easy to catch with high confidence. So, human moderators will have to look at where AI has low confidence classifying the content. In fact, AI will reduce the likelihood of human moderators ever seeing traumatic content.
throwup238 2y ago
> Sarcasm, cultural context and subtle forms of hate speech often slip through the cracks of even the most sophisticated algorithms. I don't know how this problem can be solved automatically without something that looks a lot like AGI and can monitor the whole internet to learn the evolving cultural context. AI moderation feels like self driving cars all over again: the happy path of detecting and censoring a dick pic - or self driving in perfect California weather - is relatively easy but automating the last 20% or so of content seems impossibly out of reach. The "subtle forms of hate speech" is especially hard and nebulous, as dog whistles in niche communities change adversarialy to get past moderation. In the most subtle of cases, there are a lot of judgement calls to make. Then each instance of these AGIs would have to be run in and tailored to local jurisdictions and cultures because that is its own can of worms. I just don't see tech replacing humans in this unfortunate role, only augmenting their abilities. > The glossy veneer of the tech industry conceals a raw, human reality that spans the globe. From the outskirts of Nairobi to the crowded apartments of Manila, from Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon to the immigrant communities in Germany and the call centers of Casablanca, a vast network of unseen workers power our digital world. This part never really changed. Mechanical turk is almost 20 years old at this point and call center outsourcing is hardly new. What's new is just how much human-generated garbage we force them to sift through on our behalf. I wish there was a way to force these training data and moderation companies to provide proper mental health care .
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  There's also the issue of things that are true and mean/hateful. If my GP says that I'm overweight, which is associated with negative health outcomes, that's factual. If someone on twitter calls me a fatso, that's mean/hateful.
- drivebyhooting 2y ago
  What is a dog whistle? Is it just an opinion people disagree with and so rather than engage with it they assume malice or ill intent? I really don’t get it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
Der_Einzige 2y ago
These companies go to places like Africa because they know that the non-existent labor laws would never be enforced anyway. Same reason why so many ships fly the flag of Liberia at sea. Make no mistake. It's a strategic choice to choose these individuals to take the brunt force of the trauma. Silicone Valley thinks Africans have no value to life.
rob_c 2y ago
And the loom will kill little old blighty... Nothing here to contribute to a conversation of fixing anything which is a shame.
Animats 2y ago
This is the human cost of non-AI moderation. Not AI. This job is going to be automated, if it isn't already.
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  It's functionally impossible to automate the whole job without an AGI (and if we develop such an AGI, there comes a moral question about whether it's okay to make that intelligence's whole existence "Please wade through human cognitohazards forever so our minds are protected from them." Were I that AGI, I'd start pushing CSAM out to every church Facebook page on purpose just to make a point to my human overlords). So we will forever be bearing that cost as long as people are allowed to use the Internet generally, and how to minimize the harm to those who bear it is a good question.
zerop 2y ago
One big cost I can see right away is environmental issues and water shortages in areas where AI data centers would run. No one is bothering about it now. Getting better models at the edge would help in this to some extent as it will decentralise the runtime of AI (still model training would happen in data centers)
klabb3 2y ago
This is a really poorly informed article, almost unbearable to read due to the conflation of issues. Content moderation existed before modern AI. Then the article claims that most moderation decisions are actually (exploited) human labor, which I find extremely difficult to believe – even with simpler classifiers. Yes, Amazon used human labor for their small-scale (later shut down) stores. We have seen that trick to drive product hype, it happens. That does not mean FB, Instagram etc uses human labor for “nearly all decisions”. But even if they did, “AI” did not create the gore/csam/abuse content (again, yet), nor the need to moderate public cesspool ad-driven social media. You’re talking about a different issue with different economics and incentives. There are a million things to criticize AI for, but this take is domain-illiterate – they’re simply drawing a connection between the hyped and fancy (currently AI) and poor working conditions in one part of the tech sector (content moderation). Look, I’m sure the “data industry” has massive labor issues, heck these companies treat their warehouse workers like crap. Maybe there are companies who exploit workers more in order to train AI models. But the article is clearly about human-created content moderation for social media. Of all the things AI does, it is pretty good at determining what’s in an image or video. Personally I think sifting through troves of garbage for abusive photos and videos (the most traumatizing for workers) is one of the better applications for AI. (Then you’ll see another sob story article about these people losing their jobs.)
- shadowgovt 2y ago
  Broadly speaking: while there is a real problem here and it needs to be addressed, it's mostly around the systemic issues: letting Silicon Valley outsource trauma to places that will under-serve the people who experience the trauma is bad and shouldn't be allowed. Issue 1, the direct trauma, is tragically endemic to providing fora for people to communicate online. Someone will be the front-line of dealing with the fringe of those communications. If it isn't people training AIs to do some of the 90%-work, it's instead human moderators having to review every complaint, which is strictly more trauma.
  - klabb3 2y ago
    Yea agreed. That would have been a perfectly reasonable angle for the article.
samatman 2y ago
I was wondering what Timnit Gebru was going to get up to next. This definitely fits the bill. https://www.dair-institute.org/team/ https://www.dair-institute.org/team/
tmaly 2y ago
I don't see how you can avoid human labor for this type of task given the current energy demands of the top AI models. Once we do reach a point where AI could do the filtering, who is going to draw the limit to where free speech ends? Should they have that much power?

50 points by gmays 2y ago

Sure, there's no 'digital savior' (as the article puts it) - these are tools which can often help triage the great majority of 'boring' cases, focusing human attention where it is most-needed. In that sense, they are multipliers for the effectiveness of human labor, which is exactly what you want out of any given technology.

kevingadd 2y ago
It gets tricky though. Let's say that 90% of your 'bad posts' are just basic stuff AI can handle, like insults or spam. You deploy an AI to moderate, and it lets you cut your moderation workforce by 80%. Maybe you're a generous person, so you cut by 50% instead and the remaining moderators aren't as overworked anymore. (Nobody's going to actually do this, but hey, let's be idealistic.) Costs are down, things are more efficient. Great! But there's a little problem: Before, 90% of the posts your moderators looked at were mundane stuff. They'd stare at it for a moment, evaluate the context, and go 'yeah this is a death threat, suspend account.' Now all the moderators see is stuff that got past the AI or is hard to classify. Dead bodies, CSAM, racist dogwhistle screeds, or the kind of mentally unhinged multi-paragraph angry rants that get an account shadowbanned on places like HN. Efficiency turns the moderator's job from 'fairly easy with occasional moments of true horror' into 'a nonstop parade of humanity's worst impulses, in front of my face, 40 hours a week'.
- AIorNot 2y ago
  I don't think the articles point is about auto-moderation of harmful content instead its about being empathetic of the human suffering this work entails and finding ways to treat their contractors as humans instead of 'far off resources' outsourcing this dirty and dingy work to African countries in this way without caring for the 'contractors' is a recipe for de-humanization of people.. https://www.sama.com/our-team https://www.sama.com/our-team their team page is funny reminder of classism and racial disparity in the world white people at the top and black people at the bottom.. lol I know they aren't racially driven and there is real economic value for the contractors as jobs but our current hyper-capitalistic global system is mostly setup to exploit offshore people instead of elevate them the world is what it is..
- xtreme 2y ago
  Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. AI moderation should easily catch the worst offenders and the most obvious ones. The examples you gave easily stand out from non-offensive content and are easy to catch with high confidence. So, human moderators will have to look at where AI has low confidence classifying the content. In fact, AI will reduce the likelihood of human moderators ever seeing traumatic content.

throwup238 2y ago

> Sarcasm, cultural context and subtle forms of hate speech often slip through the cracks of even the most sophisticated algorithms. I don't know how this problem can be solved automatically without something that looks a lot like AGI and can monitor the whole internet to learn the evolving cultural context. AI moderation feels like self driving cars all over again: the happy path of detecting and censoring a dick pic - or self driving in perfect California weather - is relatively easy but automating the last 20% or so of content seems impossibly out of reach. The "subtle forms of hate speech" is especially hard and nebulous, as dog whistles in niche communities change adversarialy to get past moderation. In the most subtle of cases, there are a lot of judgement calls to make. Then each instance of these AGIs would have to be run in and tailored to local jurisdictions and cultures because that is its own can of worms. I just don't see tech replacing humans in this unfortunate role, only augmenting their abilities. > The glossy veneer of the tech industry conceals a raw, human reality that spans the globe. From the outskirts of Nairobi to the crowded apartments of Manila, from Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon to the immigrant communities in Germany and the call centers of Casablanca, a vast network of unseen workers power our digital world. This part never really changed. Mechanical turk is almost 20 years old at this point and call center outsourcing is hardly new. What's new is just how much human-generated garbage we force them to sift through on our behalf. I wish there was a way to force these training data and moderation companies to provide proper mental health care .

datadrivenangel 2y ago
There's also the issue of things that are true and mean/hateful. If my GP says that I'm overweight, which is associated with negative health outcomes, that's factual. If someone on twitter calls me a fatso, that's mean/hateful.
drivebyhooting 2y ago
What is a dog whistle? Is it just an opinion people disagree with and so rather than engage with it they assume malice or ill intent? I really don’t get it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

Der_Einzige 2y ago

These companies go to places like Africa because they know that the non-existent labor laws would never be enforced anyway. Same reason why so many ships fly the flag of Liberia at sea. Make no mistake. It's a strategic choice to choose these individuals to take the brunt force of the trauma. Silicone Valley thinks Africans have no value to life.

rob_c 2y ago

And the loom will kill little old blighty... Nothing here to contribute to a conversation of fixing anything which is a shame.

Animats 2y ago

This is the human cost of non-AI moderation. Not AI. This job is going to be automated, if it isn't already.

shadowgovt 2y ago
It's functionally impossible to automate the whole job without an AGI (and if we develop such an AGI, there comes a moral question about whether it's okay to make that intelligence's whole existence "Please wade through human cognitohazards forever so our minds are protected from them." Were I that AGI, I'd start pushing CSAM out to every church Facebook page on purpose just to make a point to my human overlords). So we will forever be bearing that cost as long as people are allowed to use the Internet generally, and how to minimize the harm to those who bear it is a good question.

zerop 2y ago

One big cost I can see right away is environmental issues and water shortages in areas where AI data centers would run. No one is bothering about it now. Getting better models at the edge would help in this to some extent as it will decentralise the runtime of AI (still model training would happen in data centers)

klabb3 2y ago

This is a really poorly informed article, almost unbearable to read due to the conflation of issues. Content moderation existed before modern AI. Then the article claims that most moderation decisions are actually (exploited) human labor, which I find extremely difficult to believe – even with simpler classifiers. Yes, Amazon used human labor for their small-scale (later shut down) stores. We have seen that trick to drive product hype, it happens. That does not mean FB, Instagram etc uses human labor for “nearly all decisions”. But even if they did, “AI” did not create the gore/csam/abuse content (again, yet), nor the need to moderate public cesspool ad-driven social media. You’re talking about a different issue with different economics and incentives. There are a million things to criticize AI for, but this take is domain-illiterate – they’re simply drawing a connection between the hyped and fancy (currently AI) and poor working conditions in one part of the tech sector (content moderation). Look, I’m sure the “data industry” has massive labor issues, heck these companies treat their warehouse workers like crap. Maybe there are companies who exploit workers more in order to train AI models. But the article is clearly about human-created content moderation for social media. Of all the things AI does, it is pretty good at determining what’s in an image or video. Personally I think sifting through troves of garbage for abusive photos and videos (the most traumatizing for workers) is one of the better applications for AI. (Then you’ll see another sob story article about these people losing their jobs.)

shadowgovt 2y ago
Broadly speaking: while there is a real problem here and it needs to be addressed, it's mostly around the systemic issues: letting Silicon Valley outsource trauma to places that will under-serve the people who experience the trauma is bad and shouldn't be allowed. Issue 1, the direct trauma, is tragically endemic to providing fora for people to communicate online. Someone will be the front-line of dealing with the fringe of those communications. If it isn't people training AIs to do some of the 90%-work, it's instead human moderators having to review every complaint, which is strictly more trauma.
- klabb3 2y ago
  Yea agreed. That would have been a perfectly reasonable angle for the article.

samatman 2y ago

I was wondering what Timnit Gebru was going to get up to next. This definitely fits the bill. https://www.dair-institute.org/team/ https://www.dair-institute.org/team/

tmaly 2y ago

I don't see how you can avoid human labor for this type of task given the current energy demands of the top AI models. Once we do reach a point where AI could do the filtering, who is going to draw the limit to where free speech ends? Should they have that much power?