Sweatshops exploitation to train AI

IAlwaysUpvoteLowBudgetCreativeWork

1348

I don't know much about AI simply because I'm not trying to educate myself about it. My bad. I knew there was nothing Artificial or Intelligent about it. It can only reproduce what it was trained to do with phenomenal data processing capacities.

But today I stumbled on a press article about Sweathshops used by the AI Giants to train their engines. Then I found many others. This as real is as it is shocking.

Here's what the Washington Post wrote about it:

"More than 2 million people in the Philippines perform this type of crowdwork, according to informal government estimates, as part of AI’s vast underbelly. While AI is often thought of as human-free machine learning, the technology actually relies on the labor-intensive efforts of a workforce spread across much of the Global South and often subject to exploitation."

Full article:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/28/scale-ai-remotasks-philippines-artificial-intelligence/

current_events

artificial_intelligence

exploitation

sweathshops

crapybarra

Shit.

2 years ago |

atvcrash

Damn didn't know sweatshops used microwaves as monitors.

64664893

You can exploit them too: Amazon Mechanical Turk https://www.mturk.com

djhash

Whoever thought AI was human-free machine learning doesn’t know much about AI.

Kind of my point. This post was not to inform you and the other bright and AI educated folks. But I hope you are right. ie dumbasses like me who didn't know better just represent an insignificant minority. I'd like to think that If the press is still writing about it, it means awareness still need to be raised.

an0therthr0waway

photo not related, @op? these gents are using public-access computers. Note the coin slots next to the screens.

Crowdwork can be done on any computers. You just have to be registered. The picture is from another arcticle about AI eploitation of cheap labors. FYI here how it works https://crowdsourcing-class.org/assignment1.html

electronicbovine

Humans are similarly impressive, often doing what they're taught or conditioned to do

This post is only about 𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 of people for the sake of AI training.

Timiny

I am not sure we are heading in the right direction as a people.

My minuscule contribution this morning is sharing awareness. And it is already getting downvoted so... To your point, nobody cares (or to few).

Erdanya

Yup. All of this 'AI' is basically systems drawing from their absolutely massive database(s) of images, text, sounds, etc. and mixing and matching until their answers make sense to us. They're not 'aware' in any way, they just compare the most favorable answers to questions previously asked. This, of course, means that they need to be fed this information, and the only way to do this on a large scale is to put humans to work.

CognosNerd

I like to describe it as applied machine learning. Generative AI is determinative in that if you had access to all the training data and the weights and random numbers, you could replicate the output. The model itself can take a long time to train, distributing the work to provide clean (or cleanish) data makes perfect sense to me.

[deleted]

2 years ago (deleted Sep 8, 2024 12:17 PM) |

At no point did I say or imply that, nor did I condone this type of labor. From a technical perspective the need is there, but from a human rights perspective better controls need to be in place.

Comments (16)