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Thursday, May 11, 2023

And then there is this...

With all the hype about machine artificial intelligence, it turns out there are people behind the curtain. From Gizmodo:

ChatGPT, the wildly popular AI chatbot, is powered by machine learning systems, but those systems are guided by human workers, many of whom aren’t paid particularly well. A new report from NBC News shows that OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, has been paying droves of U.S. contractors to assist it with the necessary task of data labelling—the process of training ChatGPT’s software to better respond to user requests. The compensation for this pivotal task? $15 per hour.

“We are grunt workers, but there would be no AI language systems without it,” one worker, Alexej Savreux, told NBC. “You can design all the neural networks you want, you can get all the researchers involved you want, but without labelers, you have no ChatGPT. You have nothing.” 

Data labelling—the task that Savreux and others have been saddled with—is the integral process of parsing data samples to help automated systems better identify particular items within the dataset. Labelers will tag particular items (be they distinct visual images or sections of text) so that machines can learn to better identify them on their own. By doing this, human workers help automated systems to more accurately respond to user requests, serving a big role in the training of machine learning models...

Previously, the company outsourced its work to moderators in Africa, where—due to depressed wages and limited labor laws—it could get away with paying workers as low as $2 per hour... Kenya’s low-paid mods ultimately helped OpenAI build a filtration system that could weed out nasty or offensive material submitted to its chatbot. However, to accomplish this, the low paid moderators had to wade through screenfuls of said nasty material, including descriptions of murder, torture, sexual violence, and incest...

Full story at https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-openai-ai-contractors-15-dollars-per-hour-1850415474.

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