The African workers driving the AI revolution, for about a dollar an hour

Sounds like the type of labor-intensive scheme that suits a developing economy. If labor is abundant and capital is scarce, what you don't want are capital-intensive jobs (e.g. semiconductor fab operator) even if the wage is 100x higher. Once everyone is employed, the bidding will begin and wages will rise. [1]

Training AI is also way better than undermining Western democracy... [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...

The average monthly HOUSEHOLD income in Kenya is ~$160/mo and ~$250/mo in Nairobi [0]. Uganda is even poorer than Kenya.

$1 per hour is around market rate for this kind of a role (some kind of college education).

This kind of BPO work is how Kenya (and Uganda - they're using the same model) graduate up the services ladder.

Edit: these are employees in a Tier 4 city in Uganda. $200/mo is a great salary in a rural town like Gulu.

[0] - https://reall.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Understanding-H...

I find it a bit odd how this article conflates content moderation for social network with AI training. Of course there is a relationship there but these are not the same thing. The article gives lots of examples of trauma caused by content moderation and then blames it on the needs of AI. If anything, if we could satisfactorily train an AI for content moderation then humans wouldn't need to be in the loop (as much) so it's a weird thing to just put these ideas together like that, and is clearly just trying to feed the current zeitgeist of "AI bad".

Tired of the "shock" headlines like this: a dollar an hour isn't good or bad unless you know the context and local cost of living. Seems like that's a decent wage for those parts of the world?

The actually objectionable bit is that these jobs traumatize people over time, and desensitize them to the disturbing content they watch as a part of the job. Would I choose this over spending my day out in the heat, trying to sell food, snacks, or other wares, subject to the risk of pedestrian accidents or violent theft? Maybe?

Ideally there could just be better jobs available all around, but some people who live there might consider this at least somewhat better than some of the alternative jobs they'd otherwise be working.

Our current way of building models requires a large training data set that is already tagged/classified by humans. Unless the technology somehow improves so this is no longer necessary, these jobs are necessary. One bright spot is that once these models are trained, then humans can be out of the loop, which is certainly better than not having the models at all, and having to employ people, in perpetuity, to watch all of this content and directly make moderation decisions.

But perhaps the question we should be asking is: should we just completely do without, and never subject people to these kinds of jobs, no matter what the purpose? Maybe video, photo, etc. sharing on this scale just shouldn't exist if we have to put humans through miserable work in order to do moderation. But I don't really see this changing. So if we continue to employ people to train our AI models, can we get to a point where our future models can be used to bootstrap/train more sophisticated models, without the need for further human classification of the training data?

I worked on tooling and organization of those queues for several companies so I am very familiar with the topic. This article is a bit misleading and contains mostly half-truths

- Queues with gore and violations pay more than regular queue. You can be paid $X/hour for marking traffic lanes or roughly $1.5-1.8X for looking at somebody getting killed. This is personal choice and some people handle it better than others. If you have high empathy, you should absolutely not do it. On the other hand 5% of population are psychopaths with inhibited empathy and they do not care. This is similar to real life jobs - what you see in queues is not that different from what police see day to day in downtown SF or South Chicago.

- Same goes for sexually-explicit/porn queues. If you are 18 year old male you should absolutely not do them - it will fuck up your sexuality (similar to watching porn 8 hours/day). You will also burn out in a couple weeks anyway. The most success we saw was with 50+ year old women working from home - some worked on those queues for years.

- From the article you will notice that Africans worked on African countries queues/moderation - so it's not even imperialism or whatever where they worked on rating rich-countries content. They rated their fellow Africans.

- Africa is not that big in content moderation. Reliable coachable people are hard to find and infrastructure is not great. Salaries are also pretty high - I am not sure where they find workers for $1/hour but we paid significantly more. India does way more moderation, people are more reliable and overall it's much easier to work with Indian BPO.

The 1st two paragraphs of the article are brutal. A surreal way to start a narrative. Is that even real ? Sounds like it belongs in a movie script.

Sounds like a decent wage for that part of the world. Looks like on the medium-high end folks are making $600 a month there. Not sure how many hours worked but conservatively towards the high end that works out to $3-4 an hour.

> This particular video was of a fatal car crash.

An uncle of mine died in a car crash, in the late 80s / early 90s. The first thing my father did was drive for hours, to the place where the crash happened, and film. He then went and filmed the car wreck with its blood stains and grass stuck between the tires and the rims. A 230 km/h // 140 mph+ crash: driver lost control.

And although he could barely speak while filming he warned us in the video that this was what would happen to us if we were to act like idiots on the road.

And he, of course, forced us to watch that vid. Immediately and then a few more times at regular intervals months/years later. Best road safety lesson we ever got.

Every single person I ever crossed on the road in my life can thank my father for filming and forcing me to watch that vid.

At times there are very smart families who do allow the publication of videos of crashes where a family member died and say it's to act as a warning as to what may happen when you drive drunk/intoxicated/crazy.

It should be outlawed that families may decide that these vids are not publishable. It happened on public roads: it should be public material, as a warning to the public.

That these are not allowed on social media is criminal for these vids are the best lessons kids / teenagers can ever get when it comes to road safety.

And it is delusional to think that kids/teenagers watch that for morbid reasons: they watch such vids because their survival instinct want to make sense of what's happening.

"If you act like that, you'll kill people and/or die" is quite the lesson.

Good thing all of these AI Companies renamed their "master" branches to "main", that really solved the problem here of inequality.

> Nobody ever leaves the BPO willingly – there’s nothing else to do. She sees her ex-colleagues when she’s on her way to work, hawking vegetables on the market or trying to sell popcorn by the side of the road. If there were other opportunities, people would seize them. She just has to keep her head down, hit her targets, and make sure that whatever happens, she doesn’t get laid off.

And this is the kicker: it's all very well for us to wring our hands about how their conditions could be better, but people are voluntarily choosing to do jobs like this because it's still better than the alternatives. Staring at video footage for 8 hours a day to get paid a dollar an hour sucks, but it sucks less than walking around in a traffic jam in the African sun, trying to hawk bags of popcorn to drivers and constantly risking getting run over with no certainty of getting paid.

see related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40623629 (Cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English from the same site; 98 comments)

Why not just pay Unionized American Workers?