‘It’s destroyed me completely’: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models

Starvation wages are slavery. And yes. Our techocolonial society engages at it at many levels. No. We should not be okay with it. We should do what we can do disengage from businesses that engage in it, and we should be self forgiving of ourselves when we can't. We should always be advocating for the workers, even if sometimes that means who we're advocating for is us

Cheap labour isn’t the same as slavery... it’s still just a job employees can leave...

You're gonna get a lot of flak for that take, even though I agree with most of the rest of your post. Let's reframe the problem: you're currently paid a low wage. It's barely enough to pay for food, rent, and getting to and from your job.

You want to leave that job for one you know pays better, but it's farther away. Even if you get the job and have the better income, you would be spending the net gains on the extra costs of commuting: it ends up being a wash.

You would move closer, but because your current wage doesn't allow you to save money, you can't afford the costs of moving, let alone a down payment on a house or a deposit on an apartment.

You would get better educated so you qualify for better paying jobs, but again, you have no savings from your current job to pay for schooling, and you have no/bad credit to afford a student loan.

All the problems arrayed against you require money to solve, and because you're "cheap labor" you're never able to gather enough money to solve them. You're forcibly stuck with your current job. They pay you, yes, but you can't leave. You're "free" to leave, but that's just saying you're free to lose your home and starve. Now none of these problems are unique to Kenya, I could be describing any country with poor Economic Mobility, I could be describing any job or industry. Globalization was important for many reasons, but it has allowed companies to identify the parts of the world where labor is cheapest and pay them... exactly what they're "worth."

They can leave the job but they will still carry the psychological scars from it. They were not receiving adequate mental health support for the severity of the content they had to deal with.

Whether or not we call it slavery, it is for sure a gross exploitation of labour. The article reminds us that we in the so-called 'western world' can only afford their luxury life because there's someone elsewhere who pays the price.

Only rich people can afford new clothes every month, and if you think computer makers are passing on the savings of their exploitative practices to their customers, I've got a bridge to sell you.

It is true that LLMs and DPMs do not create, they interpolate -- that's why training data and curation of that data is so critical to begin with. Nevertheless, it is correct to say they are being used for "creative activities" as cheap and (in my opinion) unsustainable substitutes for human minds.

I know it's not. That's why it's so sad that people are offloading creative work to it

It doesn't really matter though. It will take away jobs from people in creative industries that only creative people were able to do before. The end result is basically the same.

ChatGPT and things like it just regurgitate stuff they find.

It utterly baffles me that people keep repeating this nonsense. Have you ever even bothered to try ChatGPT? At all? If you managed to make ChatGPT actually repeat existing text, congratulations, tell me how, since I never have been able to do that in months of using it. ChatGPT has no access and no way to reproduce the texts it was trained, the only thing it can successfully reproduce are shorts quotes or popular phrases ("May the force be with you") that are repeated all through pop culture. Everything beyond that it will give you as vague retelling at best. Or simply put: It literally can't "find" text, since there nothing it can search.

Same for the creativity, you can complain that the stories it writes aren't the most interesting ones or still suffer from lack of coherence when they get too long. But you can't complain that it doesn't get creative. You can throw literally any topic, item, person or whatever at it and it can weave it into a story. You can make it rhyme while doing so or turn it into haiku or talk like a pirate. And you can do so incrementally, ask it to change characters and locations in the story and it will rewrite it. And when you are out of ideas, you can ask it to come up with some.

AI discussion is starting to feel like talking to moon landing deniers, just repeating the same nonsense that has already been debunked a million times.

But that's exactly what's happening. Bloodsucking capitalists have decided that AI is a cheaper option than paying people a living wage, so creatives are losing their jobs.

Instead of actually learning how to create art, shitbag grifters claim theyre "taking the power back from creatives" and doing nothing but stealing from actual creatives to make some sort of soulless synthesis, leaving actual creatives high and dry. For just one example, look at how many publishing outlets have stopped taking submissions because of the overwhelming flood of AI spam.

All the while people are out here trying to make ends meet and are being forced into shitty, low paid jobs or gig work

And here I must be crazy thinking if it is US company paying them, maybe they deserve the equivalent of US employees, no matter what the fucking local pay is.

That "local pay" bullshit is just an excuse to exploit. Pay them what you would have to pay a US citizen for the same job or fuck right off. They don't deserve less because of geographic location.

Local pay for an international company is theft