OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic
ChatGPT was hailed as one of 2022s most impressive technological innovations upon its release last November. The powerful artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot can generate text on almost any topic or theme, from a Shakespearean sonnet reimagined in the style of Megan Thee Stallion, to complex mathematical theorems described in language a 5 year old can understand. Within a week, it had more than a million users.
ChatGPTs creator, OpenAI, is now reportedly in talks with investors to raise funds at a $29 billion valuation, including a potential $10 billion investment by Microsoft. That would make OpenAI, which was founded in San Francisco in 2015 with the aim of building superintelligent machines, one of the worlds most valuable AI companies.
But the success story is not one of Silicon Valley genius alone. In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan laborers earning less than $2 per hour, a TIME investigation has found.
The work was vital for OpenAI. ChatGPTs predecessor, GPT-3, had already shown an impressive ability to string sentences together. But it was a difficult sell, as the app was also prone to blurting out violent, sexist and racist remarks. This is because the AI had been trained on hundreds of billions of words scraped from the interneta vast repository of human language. That huge training dataset was the reason for GPT-3s impressive linguistic capabilities, but was also perhaps its biggest curse. Since parts of the internet are replete with toxicity and bias, there was no easy way of purging those sections of the training data. Even a team of hundreds of humans would have taken decades to trawl through the enormous dataset manually. It was only by building an additional AI-powered safety mechanism that OpenAI would be able to rein in that harm, producing a chatbot suitable for everyday use.
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers
phoenix75
(289 posts)Thanks for sharing.
brush
(53,776 posts)sexist spew of the countless and typical internet conversations/published data which AI mines for free as source material to create intellectual and toxic-free content on any subject matter desired.
Evidence of this exploitation of POCs will of course be downplayed, if not completely hidden, once the kudos, praise and big bucks begin flowing to the main players in AI.
cbabe
(3,541 posts)DavidDvorkin
(19,475 posts)In 2022, the minimum wage in Kenya was just over $120/month.
The country has an enormous wealth divide, with a small group of very rich at the top and the rest of the population struggling. Those ChatGPT jobs probably look pretty good to many people.
Of course it shouldn't be that way, but we can't look to corporations to act in the public interest. Their nature is to enrich their management and shareholders above all other considerations.
prodigitalson
(2,413 posts)What is the average salary in Kenya? A person working in Kenya typically earns a gross salary of $1,436/month, which includes basic pay and other benefits like housing, transport, and so on. The average net salary (after tax), on the other hand, is about $359.30/month, while the average hourly wage is $8.28.
destinationscanner.com/average-salary-in-kenya/
Average Salary in Kenya - Destination Scanner...
https://destinationscanner.com/average-salary-in-kenya/#:~:text=What%20is%20the%20average%20salary%20in%20Kenya%3F%20A,%24359.30%2Fmonth%2C%20while%20the%20average%20hourly%20wage%20is%20%248.28.
so 2 bucks is extremely shitty by Kenyan standards
DavidDvorkin
(19,475 posts)I was quoting the minimum.