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Found out that most AI training data for image recognition is actually labeled by gig workers making less than $2 an hour.
Read it in a report from the MIT Technology Review last night, has anyone else looked into how ethical the whole data pipeline behind these models really is?
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williams.jenny5d ago
Right so basically we've built Skynet but Skynet runs on slave labor from people earning less than a vending machine snack. Good luck sleeping tonight knowing your fancy AI art was trained by someone who probably can't afford to actually use the internet they're helping build. At this point just slap a "sweatshop free" label on these models and call it a day like everyone else does. Silicon Valley loves to talk about "democratizing technology" until you ask about the humans getting paid pennies to make it work. Guess we're all just fine with robots learning to see because some guy in Manila needed to feed his family for three cents a picture.
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elliot_taylor6d ago
$2 an hour? That's insane. I thought it was bad when I heard about those content moderators in the Philippines but this is a whole different level. Like, these workers are literally teaching the AI to see and they're making less than what I pay for a coffee. The MIT report said some of these platforms use "gamification" to trick people into working faster too, like turning it into a points game so they don't realize how little they're actually earning.
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cora8636d ago
Jumping off what you said about the gamification... it's even worse than that. These platforms have leaderboards and fake badges, so people feel pressured to keep going, like they're competing, when really they're just grinding through thousands of images for pennies. And the worst part? The companies that buy this data, like the big tech names everyone knows, they hide behind all these middlemen so they can claim they didn't know how bad the pay was. It's a whole system built on looking the other way, and it makes me wonder if any of these fancy AI image generators are truly built on anything clean.
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