Training AI takes a heavy toll on Kenyan workers, who say they earned $2 an hour to label and sift through gruesome content for American companies.

Workers say some of the projects for Meta and OpenAI also caused them mental harm. Wambalo was assigned to train AI to recognize and weed out pornography, hate speech and excessive violence from social media. He had to sift through the worst of the worst content online for hours on end.

  • BashfulBob [none/use name]
    ·
    2 days ago

    The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs, but right now it's also creating jobs. There's a growing global workforce of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. It's gruntwork that needs to be done accurately and fast. To do it cheaply, the work is often farmed out to developing countries like Kenya.

    Mechanical Turk bullshit is the future, folks.

    • ditty@lemm.ee
      ·
      2 days ago

      Regular Amazon MTurk is already terrible, I cant imagine mainlining csam, cartel videos, etc for pennies just to train an AI to replace me in a couple of years

      • BashfulBob [none/use name]
        ·
        2 days ago

        You'll never really get replaced. You'll just get told your labor isn't worth as much anymore. The only real way to get ahead is to call your employers' bluff.