Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.
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Cool. Using slave labor to train tools to strip the best parts of humanity away from us so that AI can do creative activities like poetry and art while we’re more and more stuck in a gig economy.
Cool cool cool cool.
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Starvation wages are slavery. And yes. Our techocolonial society engages at it at many levels. No. We should not be okay with it. We should do what we can do disengage from businesses that engage in it, and we should be self forgiving of ourselves when we can’t. We should always be advocating for the workers, even if sometimes that means who we’re advocating for is us
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Average wages in Nairobi is about $4/hr. These jobs weren’t generally high quality but they weren’t starvation, either.
Cheap labour isn’t the same as slavery… it’s still just a job employees can leave…
You’re gonna get a lot of flak for that take, even though I agree with most of the rest of your post. Let’s reframe the problem: you’re currently paid a low wage. It’s barely enough to pay for food, rent, and getting to and from your job.
You want to leave that job for one you know pays better, but it’s farther away. Even if you get the job and have the better income, you would be spending the net gains on the extra costs of commuting: it ends up being a wash.
You would move closer, but because your current wage doesn’t allow you to save money, you can’t afford the costs of moving, let alone a down payment on a house or a deposit on an apartment.
You would get better educated so you qualify for better paying jobs, but again, you have no savings from your current job to pay for schooling, and you have no/bad credit to afford a student loan.
All the problems arrayed against you require money to solve, and because you’re “cheap labor” you’re never able to gather enough money to solve them. You’re forcibly stuck with your current job. They pay you, yes, but you can’t leave. You’re “free” to leave, but that’s just saying you’re free to lose your home and starve. Now none of these problems are unique to Kenya, I could be describing any country with poor Economic Mobility, I could be describing any job or industry. Globalization was important for many reasons, but it has allowed companies to identify the parts of the world where labor is cheapest and pay them… exactly what they’re “worth.”
It’s also worth adding that your employer is incentivized not to increase your wages because they know you’re trapped as long as they don’t.
Whether or not we call it slavery, it is for sure a gross exploitation of labour. The article reminds us that we in the so-called ‘western world’ can only afford their luxury life because there’s someone elsewhere who pays the price.
People elsewhere pay the price, but it’s not in any way necessary for Western quality of life, because all it “affords” us is massive wealth inequality in our own countries, which leads to other problems like rising housing costs and severely skewed influence in politics.
Cut down on stupidly high profits for a very small group of people, by not stealing labor, and huge sections of people in other countries can have decent pay and work conditions.
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They can leave the job but they will still carry the psychological scars from it. They were not receiving adequate mental health support for the severity of the content they had to deal with.
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sdfsaf
Only rich people can afford new clothes every month, and if you think computer makers are passing on the savings of their exploitative practices to their customers, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
so that AI can do creative activities
Let me stop you right there. The current concept of “AI”–otherwise known as Large Language Models because that is really what people are referring to–is not capable of creativity. ChatGPT and things like it just regurgitate stuff they find. They can’t create something new and originalIt is true that LLMs and DPMs do not create, they interpolate – that’s why training data and curation of that data is so critical to begin with. Nevertheless, it is correct to say they are being used for “creative activities” as cheap and (in my opinion) unsustainable substitutes for human minds.
I know it’s not. That’s why it’s so sad that people are offloading creative work to it
ChatGPT and things like it just regurgitate stuff they find.
It utterly baffles me that people keep repeating this nonsense. Have you ever even bothered to try ChatGPT? At all? If you managed to make ChatGPT actually repeat existing text, congratulations, tell me how, since I never have been able to do that in months of using it. ChatGPT has no access and no way to reproduce the texts it was trained, the only thing it can successfully reproduce are shorts quotes or popular phrases (“May the force be with you”) that are repeated all through pop culture. Everything beyond that it will give you as vague retelling at best. Or simply put: It literally can’t “find” text, since there nothing it can search.
Same for the creativity, you can complain that the stories it writes aren’t the most interesting ones or still suffer from lack of coherence when they get too long. But you can’t complain that it doesn’t get creative. You can throw literally any topic, item, person or whatever at it and it can weave it into a story. You can make it rhyme while doing so or turn it into haiku or talk like a pirate. And you can do so incrementally, ask it to change characters and locations in the story and it will rewrite it. And when you are out of ideas, you can ask it to come up with some.
AI discussion is starting to feel like talking to moon landing deniers, just repeating the same nonsense that has already been debunked a million times.
Yes, I use the tools every day and understand how they work. Failing to fully explain the mechanics of LLMs does not materially change the meaning of my original statement.
There’s a reason that fan fiction is not regarded as true creative art that should be respected and discussed like other mediums: it;s not trying to do something new and original, the whole point is to re-combine and shuffle things around to sound and feel and look like the original work, just more, but not different in any real enough way to matter.
The difference between what a human mind does in transforming their nature and experiences through artistic expression and what the machine does by referencing values and expressing them in human language without any kind of understanding is very different. You are right that LLMs don’t literally copy word for word what they find, and they certainly are sophisticated pieces of technology, but what they are expressing is more processed language or images than an act of artistic creation. Less culinary experience and more industrial sausage. They do not have intelligence and are incapable of producing art of any kind. This isn’t to say they aren’t a threat to commodified art in the marketplace because they very much are, but in terms of enrichment or even entertainment the machine is not capable of producing anything worthwhile unless the viewer is looking for something they don’t have to look at for more than a moment or read with any serious interest of the contents. I’m interested in people using LLMs as a tool in their own artistic pursuits, but they have their own limitations as any tool does.
Give the AI a body with sense inputs, and allow those sense inputs to transform the “decider” value. That’s a step in the direction of true creativity
A step closer to approximating the intelligence of a worm, perhaps. I once looked into where the line is on which anamalia were capable of operant conditioning, which I hypothesize may be the first purpose of a brain, and the line on our present taxonomic hierarchy is among worms (jellyfish do not have sufficient faculties for operant conditioning and are on the other side of the line). Sensory input being associated with decider values is still not as sophisticated as learning to be attracted to beneficial things and avoiding dangerous things because the machine does not have needs or desires to base its reactions on which would have to be trained into it by those with intelligence. I’m not saying it’s impossible to artificially create a being like this, but in my estimation we are very far from it considering that we barely grasp how any brain works other than to be aware of their extreme complexity. Considering the degree of difference between a worm and a sentient human, we are much further from what we would consider a human level of intelligence.
Edit: Re-reading this it seems much more snippy than I intended and I’m not sure how to frame it to sound more neutral. I meant this as a neutral continuation of a discussion of an idea.
It doesn’t really matter though. It will take away jobs from people in creative industries that only creative people were able to do before. The end result is basically the same.
Why would AI that can’t be creative take jobs from people that are capable of being creative?
Because it’s not the AI that’s taking away jobs, but the executives hoping to cut costs regardless of creativity, quality, or ethics.
So then blame the real problem, which is not new and has always been the main enemy: capitalism and its demand for seeking profits despite any consequences.
That has nothing to do with “AI” and still doesn’t have anything to do with the original claim of whether or not the new wave of LLMs are capable of creativity.
I am. That’s the thing that I’m blaming. The claim I was making was that OpenAI has engaged in violent colonialism inherent to capitalism with the goal of making Elon rich, and the rest of us poor.
tools to strip the best parts of humanity away from us so that AI can do creative activities like poetry and art
Yeah that’s a bullshit take on AI
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sdfsaf
There’s nothing to elaborate on. It’s a stupid position put about by luddites and perpetuated by people with no understanding of the subject. It’s so not on target it’s not even wrong!
I’m a DevOps engineer. I work with big technology every day. I am very definitively not a Luddite. But the way the capitalists controlling our economy view and want to use AI is harmful to us, the lower and middle classes. I’m not sure which part of my view is so stupid that it enters into psuedoscience, leading me to not even being wrong
You’re so close. Keep going. Where’s the root cause of the problem?
I could not make it any clearer I think the root cause is capitalism. That you’re putting the focus elsewhere is exhausting
No I agree. Keep going… Why are you therefore daemonising AI rather than focusing your ire where it belongs?
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sdfsaf
Why not?
I have to admit, it’s pretty funny watching you call people Luddites as you fail to do proper markdown with your link. We all make mistakes, but the timing is pretty great, not gonna lie. But it’s not really relevant. 
You’re still just engaging in the same exact behavior. Engage with the topic or don’t, but insulting people is not the domain of people with actual arguments.
The way AI advertisers constantly call others not on board Luddites reminds me of what somebody said on badly written magic systems in fiction. It was something like they focus more on making the most complex system rather than actually asking if it will add to the story. Then when the story fails to reach an audience these authors confuse the apathy with real life anti-intellectualism.
That’s a… Random comparison
Feels pretty relevant. He’s saying rather than realizing the issue is the thing they made, they blame the audience. Both parties are guilty of this.
But that’s exactly what’s happening. Bloodsucking capitalists have decided that AI is a cheaper option than paying people a living wage, so creatives are losing their jobs.
Instead of actually learning how to create art, shitbag grifters claim theyre “taking the power back from creatives” and doing nothing but stealing from actual creatives to make some sort of soulless synthesis, leaving actual creatives high and dry. For just one example, look at how many publishing outlets have stopped taking submissions because of the overwhelming flood of AI spam.
All the while people are out here trying to make ends meet and are being forced into shitty, low paid jobs or gig work
The average cost of living is somewhere around $650 for one person, and those wages are a bit low but the higher end is above average for the country.
(I don’t know how accurate this data is, but based on https://livingcost.org/cost/kenya/United-States)
I’m not saying they shouldn’t be paid better or more, but those wages aren’t as outlandish as they sound for the country.
And here I must be crazy thinking if it is US company paying them, maybe they deserve the equivalent of US employees, no matter what the fucking local pay is.
That “local pay” bullshit is just an excuse to exploit. Pay them what you would have to pay a US citizen for the same job or fuck right off. They don’t deserve less because of geographic location.
Local pay for an international company is theft
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts, and some images, many depicting graphic scenes of violence, self-harm, murder, rape, necrophilia, child abuse, bestiality and incest, the petitioners say.
“We are in agreement with those who call for fair and just employment, as it aligns with our mission – that providing meaningful, dignified, living wage work is the best way to permanently lift people out of poverty – and believe that we would already be compliant with any legislation or requirements that may be enacted in this space,” the Sama spokesperson said.
In sample passages read by the Guardian, text that appeared to have been lifted from chat forums, include descriptions of suicide attempts, mass-shooting fantasies and racial slurs.
The announcement coincided with an investigation by Time, detailing how nearly 200 young Africans in Sama’s Nairobi datacenter had been confronted with videos of murders, rapes, suicides and child sexual abuse as part of their work, earning as little as $1.50 an hour while doing so.
She wants to see an investigation into the pay, mental health support and working conditions of all content moderation and data labeling offices in Kenya, plus greater protections for what she considers to be an “essential workforce”.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
A bot giving a summary of an article about people doing the work to train AI bots is some real snake-eating-its-own-tail shit.
To be honest, this isn’t an AI problem, but a content moderation and labor force ethics problem. You can swap out AI with social media and you’ll find the same amount of psychological harm to moderators.
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