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.
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.
Cheap labour isn’t the same as slavery. I don’t think you’ll find a company that doesn’t have these practices somewhere in their supply chain, it’s how everyone can have marvels of technology like smartphones and computers and how it’s even possible to buy new clothes every single month.
Reading and viewing random parts of the internet can have a horrible effect on the human mind because humans, as a species, really suck, but it’s still just a job employees can leave if it’s too much for them. They’re not shackled to their monitors.
The only surprising thing I found is that these companies went with Kenia rather than the traditional India/Pakistan anglosphere. I guess the economic development of those two countries has pushed tech companies to Africa, so that’s good for those countries at least!
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
These aren’t “starvation wages”. The average income in Kenya is about $1.25 per hour (or even half that depending where in the salary ranges you fall). They’re earning an average wage, up to twice the average wage. It’s a shit job, but compared to other jobs it’s not necessarily badly paid.
There are reasons to keep moderation and content filtering jobs within the west (cultural interpretations, labour protections, etc.) but if all companies did that, the economy of some developing nations would take a serious hit.
AI bullshit isn’t going to go away and we’re going to need moderation for it to work. You can choose to leave AI tools and social media behind for ethical reasons, but most people won’t. AI is giving people a competitive edge and the AI-Amish will eventually die out by simply not being as cheap and effective as their direct, local competition.
We can debate if traumatising Kenyans for average wages is better or worse than traumatising Americans, Europeans, or Asians for minimum wages, but I don’t think that’s a particularly productive discussion we’ll ever find an answer to.
We need laws for companies to make sure they provide appropriate psychological support no matter where their workers are hired.
Average wages in Nairobi is about $4/hr. These jobs weren’t generally high quality but they weren’t starvation, either.
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.”
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.
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.
It definitely is exploitation, but calling it slavery softens the blow of the very real actual slavery that still exists all over the world.
The practice isn’t limited to cheap countries, though. This shit also happens in the west, with higher wages and with more labour protection, but with the same psychological scars that can last a lifetime.
spoiler
sdfsaf
Yeah that’s a bullshit take on AI
spoiler
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?
spoiler
sdfsaf
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.
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 original
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.
I know it’s not. That’s why it’s so sad that people are offloading creative work to it