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‘Overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI
- philipallstar 1y ago[flagged]
- CPLX 1y agoGlad to learn from your post that the labor market has recently become perfectly competitive and efficient.
- philipallstar 1y ago> Glad to learn from your post that the labor market has recently become perfectly competitive and efficient. Underpaid just isn't a useful term. If it's their best option for a job in the whole world then their employer is the best it could possibly be. Describing that situation as "underpaid" is just manipulative.
- crazygringo 1y agoI mean, it's competitive and efficient enough? It doesn't need to be perfect for it to be good enough. People change jobs all the time. Yes, it involves some time, effort, and tradeoffs. But the worse your current job is, the higher the benefits of switching are.
- CPLX 1y agoGoogle is an illegal monopoly, that’s the post trial judgement of multiple courts. It has used its monopoly powers to extract vast wealth from various sectors of the economy, and it has also been sanctioned for illegally manipulating labor markets. So there’s just no reason at all to hand wave any transactions they are involved in as the result of simple supply and demand.
- crazygringo 1y agoGoogle has been found to exert various monopoly behavior in certain markets like ads search. It's not a monopoly overall, like in cloud computing or office applications. And it's very much not a monopoly in hiring for these types of lower-level jobs. Not to mention these are all seemingly through contractors anyways, of which there are many, and they provide these types of services for multiple companies. So I honestly don't know what you're talking about.
- CPLX 1y agoI am talking about the widespread fiction that markets are efficient and rational, despite overwhelming evidence that they are in fact rigged in favor of participants with market power.
- crazygringo 1y agoGoogle doesn't have market power in the market of this particular set of jobs. Many companies are competing for people with these skills, including for the exact same type of work, and there's zero evidence of any kind of collusion going on. You're going to have to be specific about what rigging you think is happening. This isn't anything like when Apple, Google, Adobe, etc. were colluding not to poach each other's engineers in 2005-2009 [1]. Job markets like aren't perfect-perfect, but they're mostly decently efficient and rational, as far as supply and demand and pricing goes, with just everyday normal friction. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- CPLX 1y agoMy argument is the burden of proof goes the other way at this point.
- crazygringo 1y agoGood luck trying to convince anyone, then. That's an extreme ideological position, not a reasonable evidence-based one.
- bflesch 1y agoThe way you defend against an article citing "thousands of workers" by using a nitpicky criticism about grammar style makes me suspect that it raises a cognitive dissonance in your head that you are not ready to address yet.
- philipallstar 1y agoWhat I said was nothing to do with "grammar style".
- sjiabq 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- blactuary 1y agoYeah they should simply buy widgets from the abundance of other widget sellers since this is a perfectly competitive market with no transaction costs and perfectly symmetric information
- kerblang 1y agoAre other AI companies doing the same thing? Would like to see more articles about this...
- jkkola 1y agoThere's a YouTube video titled "AI is a hype-fueled dumpster fire" [0] that mentions OpenAI's shenanigans. I haven't fact checked that but I've heard enough stories to believe it. [0] https://youtu.be/0bF_AQvHs1M?si=rpMG2CY3TxnG3EYQ https://youtu.be/0bF_AQvHs1M?si=rpMG2CY3TxnG3EYQ
- thepryz 1y agoScale AI’s entire business model was using people in developing countries to label data for training models. Once you look into it, it comes across as rather predatory. This was one of the first links I found re: Scale’s labor practices https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/22/scale-ai-is-facing-a-third-worker-lawsuit-in-about-a-month/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/22/scale-ai-is-facing-a-third... Here’s another: https://relationaldemocracy.medium.com/an-authoritarian-workplace-culture-4ba5f3666f9f https://relationaldemocracy.medium.com/an-authoritarian-work...
- lawgimenez 1y agoCouple of months ago I received a job invite for Kotlin AI trainers from the team at Upwork. I asked what the job is about and she says something like "for the opportunity to review & evaluate content for generative AI." And I'm from a developed country too.
- benreesman 1y agoThere's nontrivial historical precedent for this exact playbook: when a new paradigm (Lisp machines and GOFAI search, GPU backprop, softmax self-attention) is scaling fast, a lot of promises get made, a lot of national security money gets involved, and AI Summer is just balmy. But the next paradigm breakthrough is hard to forecast, and the current paradigm's asymptote is just as hard to predict, so it's +EV to say "tomorrow" and "forever". When the second becomes clear before the first, you turk and expert label like it's 1988 and pray that the next paradigm breakthrough is soon, you bridge the gap with expert labeling and compute until it works or you run out of money and the DoD guy stops taking your calls. AI Winter is cold. And just like Game of Thrones, no I mean no one, not Altman, not Amodei, not Allah Most Blessed knows when the seasons in A Song of Math and Grift will change.
- cs702 1y agoThe title is biased, blaming Google for mistreating people and implying that Google's AI isn't smart, but the OP is worth reading, because it gives readers a sense of the labor and cost involved in providing AI models with human feedback, the HF in RLHF, to ensure they behave in ways acceptable to human beings, more aligned with human expectations, values, and preferences.
- lm28469 1y ago> to ensure the AI models are more aligned with human values and preferences. And which are these universal human values and preferences ? Or are we talking about silicon valley's executives values ?
- alehlopeh 1y agoWell, it doesn’t say universal so it’s clearly going to be a specific set of human values and preferences. It’s obviously referring to the preferences of the humans who are footing the bill and who stand to profit from it. The extent to which those values happen to align with those of the eventual consumer of this product could potentially determine whether the aforementioned profits ever materialize.
- giveita 1y ago> Sawyer is one among the thousands of AI workers contracted for Google through Japanese conglomerate Hitachi’s GlobalLogic to rate and moderate the output of Google’s AI products... Depends how you look at it. I think a brand like Google should vet a mere one level down the supply chain.
- FirmwareBurner 1y agoI had no idea Hitachi was also running software sweatshops.
- rs186 1y ago> to ensure the AI models are more aligned with human values and preferences. to ensure the AI models are more aligned with Google's values and preferences. FTFY
- zerodaysbroker 1y agoThe title seems kinda misleading, this is from the article (GlobalLogic is the company contracted by Google): "AI raters at GlobalLogic are paid more than their data-labeling counterparts in Africa and South America, with wages starting at $16 an hour for generalist raters and $21 an hour for super raters, according to workers. Some are simply thankful to have a gig as the US job market sours, but others say that trying to make Google’s AI products better has come at a personal cost."
- imperio59 1y ago[flagged]
- teiferer 1y agoThat argument is as old as any mistreated worker complaining about their situation and as old as any argument against workers rights in general. Anybody not liking their job could just leave right? Simple! No, the world just isn't that simple and it didn't become simpler just because it happens in an AI context that produces a tool you like. There are lots of jobs out there that suck and people do them anyway. Because the freedom that they supposedly have is not as free as you imagine.
- bitshiftfaced 1y agoWhat explains not changing jobs because you find it distressing and claiming that you're being paid below what you're worth? It seems like if that were true, then you'd be motivated to find a job that pays market rate. And if you couldn't, then you could at least find another job that pays less than market rate, like your current job, but isn't so distressing.
- refactor_master 1y agoMaybe these people are trying to keep their skills and degrees honed somehow in a bad market, rather than going straight for a less-distressing-but-also-lower-paying job that does nothing to their skillset.
- mallowdram 1y agoGemini is faked. How this industry managed to not grasp that meaning exists entirely separate from words is altogether bizarre.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dolphinscorpion 1y ago"Google" posted a job opening. They applied for and took the job, agreeing to posted pay and conditions. End of the story. It's not up to the Guardian to decide
- xkbarkar 1y agoI agree, article is pretty low quality ragebait. Not good journalism at all.
- lysace 1y agoIt is amazing how much their quality levels have fallen during the past two decades. I used to point to their reporting as something that my nation’s newspapers should seek to emulate. (My nation’s newspapers have since fallen even lower.)
- jimnotgym 1y agoIs it amazing? They are struggling to make money as much as every other news organisation, they have to keep cutting costs to do it. Then they need as many click throughs from social platforms as possible so that they can sell at least some advertising. I would say it is inevitable.
- lysace 1y agoIt is inevitable that the journalistic integrity of the Guardian goes to shit?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- anthonj 1y agoNot so easy. What if you get hired as a physiotherapist somewhere but on your first day you find out you will work in a brothel? Or join an hospital as nurse, but then you are asked to perform surgery as you were a doctor? There are serious issues outlined in the article.
- iandanforth 1y ago"Google said in a statement: “Quality raters are employed by our suppliers and are temporarily assigned to provide external feedback on our products. Their ratings are one of many aggregated data points that help us measure how well our systems are working, but do not directly impact our algorithms or models.” GlobalLogic declined to comment for this story." (emphasis mine) How is this not a straight up lie? For this to be true they would have to throw away labeled training data.
- Gracana 1y agoThey probably don’t do it at a scale large enough to do RLHF with it, but it’s still useful feedback the people working on the projects / products.
- zozbot234 1y agoMore recent models actually use "reinforcement learning from AI feedback", where the task of assigning a reward is essentially fed back into the model itself. Human feedback is then only used to ground the training, on selected examples (potentially even entirely artificial ones) where the AI is most highly uncertain about what feedback should be given.
- _2d30 1y agoBecause they are doing it to compute quality metrics not to implement RLHF. It’s not training data.
- teiferer 1y ago
- ants_everywhere 1y agoWhen they switch to aligning with algorithms instead of humans we'll get another story about how terrible it was that they removed the jobs that were terrible when they existed. This doesn't sound as bad to me as the Facebook moderator job or even a call center job, but it does sound pretty tedious.
- lysace 1y agowith wages starting at $16 an hour for generalist raters and $21 an hour for super raters, according to workers That’s sort of what I expect the Guardian’s UK online non-sub readers to make. Perhaps GlobalLogic should open a subsidiary in the UK?
- oldpersonintx2 1y ago[dead]
- simonw 1y agoSomething I'd be interested to understand is how widespread this practice is. Are all of the LLMs trained using human labor that is sometimes exposed to extreme content? There are a whole lot of organizations training competent LLMs these days in addition to the big three (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic). What about Mistral and Moonshot and Qwen and DeepSeek and Meta and Microsoft (Phi) and Hugging Face and Ai2 and MBZUAI? Do they all have their own (potentially outsourced) teams of human labelers? I always look out for notes about this in model cards and papers but it's pretty rare to see any transparency about how this is done.
- yvdriess 1y agoOne of the key innovations behind the DNN/CNN models was Mechanical Turk. OpenAI used a similar system extensively to improve the early GPT models. I would not be surprised that the practice continues today; NN models needs a lot of quality ground truth training data.
- simonw 1y agoRight, but where are the details? Given the number of labs that are competing these days on "open weights" and "transparency" I'd be very interested to read details of how some of them are handling the human side of their model training. I'm puzzled at how little information I've been able to find.
- esperent 1y agoI read this a few years ago. Time Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ Beyond that, I think the reason you haven't heard more about it is that it happens in developing countries, so western media doesn't care much, and also because big AI companies work hard to distance themselves from it. They'll never be the ones directly employing these AI sweatshop works, it's all contracted out.
- conradkay 1y ago
- a3w 1y agoAI means actual indians, did we not learn that from the initial OpenAI GPT 3.0 training? It made it to HN.
- TNDnow 1y ago[dead]
- wslh 1y agoIt seems a deja vu of previous Amazon's Mechanical Turk[1] discussions[2] but with AI. [1] https://www.mturk.com/ https://www.mturk.com/ [2] https://tinyurl.com/4r2p39v3 https://tinyurl.com/4r2p39v3
- oefrha 1y ago> [job] … has come at a personal cost. Congratulations, you just described most jobs. And many backbreaking laborers make about the same or less, even in the U.S., not to mention the rest of the world.
- parineum 1y agoCan you believe that companies would ask people to do things they normally wouldn't in exchange for money!? These types of articles always have an elitist view of the workers hired. That's a big source of the right (in the US) despising the left. The left don't say it directly, but when they talk about how shitty their town is and how the job they have is exploitative, there's an implicit judgment on the persons who live/work there.
- yanis_t 1y agoFrom my shallow understanding, it seems that human training is involved heavily in the post-training/fine-tuning stage, after the base model has been solidified already. In that case, how is the notion of truthiness (what the model accepts as right or wrong) affected during this stage , that is affected by human beings vs. it being sealed into the basic model itself, that is truthiness being deduced by the method / part of its world model.
- mentalgear 1y agoIn many things "AI" is just another form exploiting the poor to make the rich even wealthier. A form of digital colonialism.
- TNDnow 1y ago[dead]
- onlinehost 1y agoI'm a contractor for one of these companies. It pays okay ($45+/hour) if you can pass qualifications for your area of expertise but the work isn't steady and communication is non-existent. The coding qualifications I did were difficult FAANG algorithm analysis questions. The work has definitely gotten harder over the last year and often says we need to come up with Masters/PhD level work or problems that someone with 5+ years of experience in a field would have difficulty solving. I wish I had a regular job but I live in rural North Carolina and remote work is hard to come by.
- dfxm12 1y agoIs something stronger than your wish to get a regular job tying you to where you currently live?
- SamoyedFurFluff 1y agoI just want to note that asking this question implies an openness to one’s personal affairs that may not be appropriate in an anonymous, public setting. A person offering context and insight to a topic is not necessarily an invitation to an for more personal contexts and insights.
- dfxm12 1y agoI understand it's personal, but I also recognize they went out of their way to bring it up. Some people, including me, are more willing to discuss things anonymously because it adds a layer of impersonality. This is just a discussion board. If OP doesn't answer, that's ok. I don't ever think I'm entitled a response.
- tossandthrow 1y agoIt is a reasonable question that also emphasizes the composite cost of decisions. Personally I would love to live in a more rural place, but until I am self sufficient enough, this is not an opportunity I am willing to take.
- bapak 1y ago
- simianwords 1y agoTheir work doesn’t seem that bad. This article tries really hard to portray that a simple freelance desk job is somehow literally exploitation or something. Lots of people would do anything to get such work.
- paczki 1y agoTo be honest, this job has changed my entire life. I don't exactly work with Google but nonetheless it's the same job being discussed. Nothing really egregious has happened to me in the months that I've been at it, other than only having 4 hours to fact check and verify a huge amount of information for one job, and it just wasn't enough time for me so I didn't get paid. But that was once out of hundreds? thousands? of tasks. Unfortunately, I decided to take software engineering more serious and try to make it my career and then the entire market nosedived, with no signs of recovering anytime soon. Breaking into this market has more or less been impossible for a junior, and dare I say: a junior in their mid 30s. At least within this job I do get to work with code every so often, and I get to do it from home while I'm at it which is a bonus. It's inconsistent so I'm still learning and looking for software, but for the meantime it's been incredible.
- hliyan 1y agoAt least a few of these anecdoates are worrying: > “At first they told [me]: ‘Don’t worry about time – it’s quality versus quantity,’” she said. > But before long, she was pulled up for taking too much time to complete her tasks. “I was trying to get things right and really understand and learn it, [but] was getting hounded by leaders [asking], ‘Why aren’t you getting this done? You’ve been working on this for an hour.’” And: > Dinika said he’s seen this pattern time and again where safety is only prioritized until it slows the race for market dominance. Human workers are often left to clean up the mess after a half-finished system is released. “Speed eclipses ethics,” he said. “The AI safety promise collapses the moment safety threatens profit.” Finally: > One work day, her task was to enter details on chemotherapy options for bladder cancer, which haunted her because she wasn’t an expert on the subject.
- lostdog 1y agoYeah, you can see this with Google's search results too. They're trying to improve on some internal metric, but the metric was clearly generated from ratings by people ignorant of the topics. And so the search results get worse, but appear better internally. Great to see that they have not learned from this experience, and are repeating the mistake with Gemini.
- mallowdram 1y agoHow is this not Quest Diagnostics slipping into Theranos territory, buttressed by a hidden factory of typists? This reminds me of the early voice-to-text start ups in the 00's that had these miraculous demos that required people in call centers to type it all up and pretend it was machine.
- cjbarber 1y agoI previously made a list on twitter of some data labeling startups that work with foundation model companies.[1] Here's the RLHF provider section: RLHF providers: 1. Surge. $1b+ revenue bootstrapped. DataAnnotation is the worker-side (you might've seen their ads), also TaskUp and Gethybrid. 2. Scale. The most well known. Remotasks and Outlier are the worker-side 3. Invisible. Started as a kind of managed VA service. 4. Mercor. Started mostly as a way to hire remote devs I think. 5. Handshake AI. Handshake is a college hiring network. This is a spinout 6. Pareto 7. Prolific 8. Toloka 9. Turing 10. Sepal AI. The team is ex-Turing 11. Datacurve. Coding data. 12. Snorkel. Started as a software platform for data labeling. Offers some data as a service now. 13. Micro1. Also started as a way to hire remote contractor devs [1]: https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1965096585555272072 https://x.com/chrisbarber/status/1965096585555272072
- skywhopper 1y agoThis definitely explains why Google’s AI Search Results is so bad at what it purports to do.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- luke-stanley 1y agoIt's strange that the Guardian mentions OpenAI's "O3" model and not GPT-5. Maybe they think o3 is SOTA still, but they should at least name it correctly, in lowercase as OpenAI does.
- back2dafucha 1y agoDiminishing returns is an ugly business. And thats obviously where we are at. The end not the beginning of LLM "innovation". Any technology that creates "sysiphian" tasks, is not worth anyones time. That includes LLMs, and "Big Data". The "herculean effort" that never ends is the proof in the pudding. The tech doesnt work. Its like using machine learning for self driving instead of having an actual working algorythm. Your bust.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- sjfaljf 1y agoHow convenient: throw economy in shambles, coerce professionals into labeling labor in an effort to make humanity obsolete. Will it work?
- agigao 1y agoIsn't this misleading? to say at least...
- throwawaysleep 1y agoI work for a few of these during meetings and such. Some are so picky about getting everything done quickly that I can’t believe the data is very valuable.