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Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

theguardian.com

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Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#31

Post by therobot24 »

syntheticmindai wrote: post #21
belval wrote: post #9

> Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson. I don't like how journalists never adjust the salary when doing those conversions. Yes $1.46 in the US sounds like the most abdject poverty, but Kenya is not the US. The minimum salary in Kenya is $1.05 so even their lower bound is 39% higher than the minimum salary with their upper bound being 358% higher. For job that while psych…

If you worked for Sama and was sent to work in Kenya, would you take a salary cut just because your cost of living has reduced? Pay people what they are worth, not based on where they choose to live.

in general, there's an economic argument to be made that if you pay disproportionate wages for unskilled labor then there will likely be less skilled labor (doctors, engineers, etc.) in the market which can cripple the ability of the area to grow past unskilled work

Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#32

Post by giraffe_lady »

belval wrote: post #9

> Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson. I don't like how journalists never adjust the salary when doing those conversions. Yes $1.46 in the US sounds like the most abdject poverty, but Kenya is not the US. The minimum salary in Kenya is $1.05 so even their lower bound is 39% higher than the minimum salary with their upper bound being 358% higher. For job that while psych…

idk man psychologically scarring sounds pretty bad to me that's not normally a thing people are wanting from their job.

Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#33

Post by frandroid »

SomethingNew2 wrote: post #8

Based on the information in the article these complaints were raised after the contract was ended. Why not refuse the work or raise the complaint at the time? The article also mentions the work was worse than they thought, but indicates they were told what the work entailed before starting it. Also the primary person being quoted lost his wife and family, and blames this work on why he lost his wife. Anyone who has b…

Have you not ever had a shitty job that you could not afford to quit because there was no other work at comparable salary available to you? They talk about how they specifically targeted new graduates. The economy in Kenya is not exactly Silicon Valley.

Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#34

Post by frandroid »

oefrha wrote: post #2

I wonder if executives of companies using mturk-like humans to moderate/classify vile content should be compelled to do the same moderation/classification work themselves for an hour a month. Of course it’s highly unlikely to actually compel them to do this through legislation, but it’s an interesting thought.

Sure, but the CEOs are already psychopaths, so they would say "see, I can do this sick work too, get back to it!!"

Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#35

Post by dstroot »

What is stopping us from creating a "supervisory AI" that understands the difference between good content and bad content and having it perform the role of these humans? More broadly speaking training and overseeing a sufficiently advanced AI seems like it could only be done effectively by another AI. The human oversight could be temporarily redirected to validating the supervisory AI.

Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#36

Post by bobjordan »

syntheticmindai wrote: post #21
belval wrote: post #9

> Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson. I don't like how journalists never adjust the salary when doing those conversions. Yes $1.46 in the US sounds like the most abdject poverty, but Kenya is not the US. The minimum salary in Kenya is $1.05 so even their lower bound is 39% higher than the minimum salary with their upper bound being 358% higher. For job that while psych…

If you worked for Sama and was sent to work in Kenya, would you take a salary cut just because your cost of living has reduced? Pay people what they are worth, not based on where they choose to live.

If a worker effectively performs the required tasks for $1.46/hr, this demonstrates the work's intrinsic value quite explicitly. The onus to make a higher wage to improve their lifestyle is on the individual, given the freedom they have to allocate their time as they see fit. It's not incumbent upon others or businesses to pay more for tasks if a lower-cost, higher-value solution exists.

Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#37

Post by robertlagrant »

syntheticmindai wrote: post #21
belval wrote: post #9

> Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson. I don't like how journalists never adjust the salary when doing those conversions. Yes $1.46 in the US sounds like the most abdject poverty, but Kenya is not the US. The minimum salary in Kenya is $1.05 so even their lower bound is 39% higher than the minimum salary with their upper bound being 358% higher. For job that while psych…

If you worked for Sama and was sent to work in Kenya, would you take a salary cut just because your cost of living has reduced? Pay people what they are worth, not based on where they choose to live.

> Pay people what they are worth

There is no "what they are worth". There's competition for employees and what they can accept. The same force drives you being paid tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That's not an abstract "what you're worth". They aren't being kind to you. They're just paying what you'll accept, exactly as they are paying those people what they would accept.

Not to say companies couldn't be a little kinder to some people, particularly when it would cost them so very little. I just think phrases like "what you're worth" only obscures what's actually happening, and makes it harder to understand it.

Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#38

Post by dagaci »

SomethingNew2 wrote: post #8

Based on the information in the article these complaints were raised after the contract was ended. Why not refuse the work or raise the complaint at the time? The article also mentions the work was worse than they thought, but indicates they were told what the work entailed before starting it. Also the primary person being quoted lost his wife and family, and blames this work on why he lost his wife. Anyone who has b…

Hindsight is a great thing; I would assume that psychological damage accumulates. The question you are asking the man who lost his wife was: “Didn’t you know that constantly reading horrific texts, and looking at horrific images would wreck your mind. You should have known before you started?!” This is just a petition for the Kenyan government to investigate. Kenyan government may need to apply some age restriction, and require that staff be filtered by stability before the start reviewing horrible materials” "texts, and some images, many depicting graphic scenes of violence, self-harm, murder, rape, necrophilia, child abuse, bestiality and incest"

Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#39

Post by bschne »

syntheticmindai wrote: post #21
belval wrote: post #9

> Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson. I don't like how journalists never adjust the salary when doing those conversions. Yes $1.46 in the US sounds like the most abdject poverty, but Kenya is not the US. The minimum salary in Kenya is $1.05 so even their lower bound is 39% higher than the minimum salary with their upper bound being 358% higher. For job that while psych…

If you worked for Sama and was sent to work in Kenya, would you take a salary cut just because your cost of living has reduced? Pay people what they are worth, not based on where they choose to live.

You would not take this option because you prefer living in the U.S. (or wherever) and being employed there, but that's not the relevant counterfactual for the people doing this work, and it seems like it's preferable to other options they actually have, else it would hardly attract workers.

Don't get me wrong, companies have an obligation to guarantee some level of workplace safety and healthy conditions etc.! But arguing that it's exploitation to buy labour where it is more affordable is plain silly.

Re: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI

#40

Post by pledgist »

dstroot wrote: post #35

What is stopping us from creating a "supervisory AI" that understands the difference between good content and bad content and having it perform the role of these humans? More broadly speaking training and overseeing a sufficiently advanced AI seems like it could only be done effectively by another AI. The human oversight could be temporarily redirected to validating the supervisory AI.

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