Minimum wage ‘ghosts’ keep AI arms race from becoming a nightmare

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-02-16/column-google-microsoft-chatgpt-bard-raters

by miles • 3 years ago

66 66 3 years ago

hypothesis• 3 years ago

Using RTO to punish disabled folks for demanding better wages is just something that AI would come up with, right?

wizzwizz4• 3 years ago

If you consider existing AI computer systems, no: they're not powerful enough. If you mean non-human human-created intelligences, then our institutions could count: in which case, yes it is.

hourago• 3 years ago

“We make some of the lowest wages in the U.S.,” Stackhouse, who has been a rater for nearly a decade, says. “I personally make $3 less per hour than my daughter working in fast food.”
Stackhouse has a serious heart condition requiring medical management, but his employer, Appen — whose sole client is Google — caps his hours at 26 per week, keeping him part-time, and ineligible for benefits.

What a cruel system.

throw0092• 3 years ago

If you don't like a job find one that pays better. I was working something similar at university and rather enjoyed being paid to read the news and summarise them. I didn't want it to be a career and neither did the company I worked for.

DoctorOW3• 3 years ago

...and what happens when you can't find one? The narrative that there are all these jobs being turned down is false. The jobs that would hire someone like Stackhouse are all pretty much the same as the one he has. This wouldn't matter so much if it wasn't matter of a life and death but they won't even let someone survive anymore.

throwbadubadu2• 3 years ago

You have been downvoted, but I also wonder a bit what the real story (or debate) is here.

Some jobs will pay the lowest wage... that it is these jobs? I actually would rate and expect these jobs pay lower than the typical lowest pay jobs which require physical labor like the typical low pay jobs in fast food, or building cleaning?

Or the specific amount given current circumstances? True.. on the other hand still well above the minimum wage by law in most European countries.. maybe not comparable well, but still not much out of range.

That rich companies pay low wages? Yeah, absurd and unfair, but that unfortunately never hold a rich company back where it could just pay that (I'd like different regulation here).

So the problem is really independent of these specific jobs or companies? And the answer to this is better regulation and worker protection laws, that many frown upon?

flangola7• 3 years ago

Ah yes, the mythical land of jobbies. Unfortunately we need solutions that work in real life and not an Ayn Rand fantasy.

MonkeyMalarky• 3 years ago

Unfortunately the cruel system will continue to persist as long as people refuse to acknowledge it's existence.

catach• 3 years ago

After acknowledgement comes the rationalization layers. Necessary but not sufficient.

krapp• 3 years ago

Not only do people acknowledge its existence, they believe its cruelty is just and fair.

tbrownaw• 3 years ago

caps his hours at 26 per week, keeping him part-time, and ineligible for benefits.

Benefits should not be yes/no at some hours-per-week cutoff.

Or really, they shouldn't be a thing. Fix any tax bs that makes it cheaper for employers to pay for them rather than employees and remove any rules that say employees have to provide them. ... err, I guess time off might count as a benefit, so make sure any rules scale linearly all the way to zero.

How much an employee costs shouldn't have sudden jumps at particular numbers of hours. Employees shouldn't depend on their employees for anything more than a (fungible, because it's just money) paycheck.

kevviiinn6• 3 years ago

Almost like there should be a system of healthcare not tied to employment or income

crooked-v• 3 years ago

If we can ever get Medicare For All in place in the US, the biggest benefits anchors will evaporate all at once.

antifa3• 3 years ago

Why move the Rube Goldberg machine from employment to corporate tax codes when we can just have Medicare For All?

neonate• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/5IiPc

startupsfail5• 3 years ago

I once saw a business co-Founder joining a startup from Google, around a decade back. Leaving his 500k Googler salary to be a Founder at a hot startup. He was from Indian origins and an Ivy League MBA.

His first contribution, besides joining with his credentials was to cut down a few cents per hour from what we’ve been paying to a sweatshop some place in India. That was annotating images for us. From somewhat strange biases in the annotated data, it was likely that this sweatshop was employing children.

Incidentally, Google had acquihired that startup.

Waterluvian2• 3 years ago

“Ivy League MBA.”

Do other countries label a caste of “prestigious” universities like the U.S. does?

pvg• 3 years ago

'Oxbridge'. Most countries just aren't as big and/or don't have as many prestige branded universities. Many have a one or two that serve similar signaling purposes.

morelisp• 3 years ago

The USA elite wish they had something as conveniently entrenched as Oxbridge.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn• 3 years ago

Yes, we do too in the UK, the Russell Group [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Group

DoctorNick• 3 years ago

"Three years in jail is a good corrective for three years at Harvard" - Alger Hiss

profstasiak• 3 years ago

what a dystopia. Was it ever predicted in any science fiction book? Maybe the economists are right - AI wont make us all unemployed. The only problem is, our only jobs will be such abhorent as these ones those poor people have, improving the next version of AI

visarga• 3 years ago

It is hard for me to compute this. AI engineers know very well the value of good training data. They all get to label some, they get close and personal with it. But when it comes to job titles and perks, it's like the labelling people are inferior.

I have worked as a ML engineer close with internal labelling teams and let me tell you, not everyone could do it. It is a hard job, and often requires deep thinking to solve. Many ML engineers themselves are actually bad at labelling.

And the contribution of the labelling team can be equal sized or more important than that of the ML engineers. In normal conditions you need at least one labelling person / engineer, all projects need labelling, there's never a gap, labelling is never finished. Finding a good labeller is also hard - not everyone on the street could do it, contrary to public expectations.

lifeisstillgood• 3 years ago

Like a really good tester ?

layer82• 3 years ago

How do you assess labelling quality? What I’m wondering is, how would the feedback loop work, in the longer term, between quality of AI output and paying/selecting labellers?

startupsfail5• 3 years ago

There are big upsides as well. Ii the moment you’ve got ChatGPT interacting with millions of people and in general exhibiting better than median human reasoning, kindness, rationality, positivity, listening and understanding skills. These interactions to some degree are equivalent to having access to a good engaging teacher. Think Sezame Channel, only adult level one. The results might be very positive.

kevviiinn6• 3 years ago

A good engaging teacher... that gives you incorrect information?

11235813212• 3 years ago

That seems to be what the Open AI administrators believe, but it’s more likely that the monotonous rhetorical style of LMMs will go out of style or prompt a backlash by humans against polished, reasonable-sounding, slightly wordy conversation.

mortenjorck• 3 years ago

I don’t know if any serious authors have, but my finish-it-one-of-these-days novel is premised on a perpetually almost-there state of the art in AI that is constantly hand-held by an invisible underclass.

Although I’m starting to think I ought to finish it soon just in case this current pace of advancement in LLMs doesn't stall out for once.

kevviiinn6• 3 years ago

Just have chatgpt write it for you

sonofhans• 3 years ago

Not as literal a take as you might like, but Fritz Lang’s _Metropolis_, of course — an invisible, downtrodden underclass breaks their backs on the machines so that a mediocre elite can live in the clouds. That was nearly 100 years ago.

huevosabio• 3 years ago

I never understand this type of hate-porn.

These jobs are not horrible, not for humanity's historical standards. They can be done from home, without commute, without physical and demanding labor. A medieval peasant, a 1800s factory worker and probably many of the 1900s low skilled laborers would take this over the alternatives.

Moreover, these people have every right and option to not do it, in fact right now the labor market is such that they have valuable alternatives!

We keep thinking about how this or that job is not acceptable for _our personal standards_, but until we get Fully Automated Luxury Communism we have to be honest that progress looks this: slightly less shitty jobs in exchange for higher quality of life.

AndrewKemendo3• 3 years ago

They aren't less shitty they are shittier in different ways, but the key point is that they are progressively more alienated from the value they provide and the community structure.

rvba• 3 years ago

The main protagonist of the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by Orewell worked in the Ministry of Truth and his job was to rewrite historical records to conform to the state's ever-changing version of history. Basically he was a censor, who would remove inconvenient people or facts from newspapers or books. (I dont think Internet existed in the situation described in the book).

1984 was a big critic of communism, where facts dont mater and history can be rewritten. Are we really far from that?

* Those poorly paid raters label things - and a lot of things depends on quality of their work. Do those companies even cross-check their work, when the idea is to get the lowest bidder? (on a side note, why FAANG companies dont understand the "garbage in, garbage out" concept? They can pay 300k usd to some programmer, yet they skimp on getting classifiers from USA or Europe who know the cultural context)

* Then there are probably censors, who can censor things based on their own ideas. Probably censorship can happen at two levels: first by using labels, then by deciding what to show based on those labels.

* Some websites have "fact checkers", who are necessary (with the amount of lies written in troll-farms and soon lies written by AI), but you cant really appeal about their process in any way - and those are some faceless people from third world countries.

*Often you cannot ever contact with a real person, Google and Facebook are the worst here. Microsoft is a bit better, because if you pay them money for support, you can get human support.

* Wikipedia is a constant war between vandals, but also actors that are much smarter (seem state sponsored even). When we speak about Wikipedia it is incredibly sad that it never introduced any systems to review the work of their admins (I saw a situation where some articles are "guarded" by 2-3 admins who share their own >version of facts< and nobody can do anything about that). And this could be solved by setting up panels of judges that judge edits that are anonymous. Or setting a panel of judges who judge actions of admins (yes, there is that "Arbitration Committee" that barely works). Of course then there is the question "who watches the watchmen", but still - Wikipedia Foundation has millions of dollars that they waste on various things, instead of spending it to improve their core product.

On a side note, I always thought about starting such a data labeling business; I think a lot of work done by current labelers is still low quality. I saw some start-ups that were checking things (e.g. medical data) and they would pay peanuts to the people who labeled their data. Then they would get bad labels.. and build wrong conclusions on that with their classifiers.

antifa3• 3 years ago

1984 was a big critic of communism, where facts dont mater and history can be rewritten. Are we really far from that?

Imagine the balls it takes to pretend like the United States isn't the biggest icon of "facts don't matter".

AndrewKemendo3• 3 years ago

"The march toward perfect alienation and exploitation will make any job unthinkable at any pay rate." [1]

[1] https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf

febeling• 3 years ago

Interesting to learn who’s the single source of truth about propaganda classification. This uneducated „rater“ on minimal wage, training a search engine is probably maximally dependent on the job. What could go wrong?

Frummy• 3 years ago

I remember working for Appen as a teenager. I saw it as a video game and became really really fast at labeling and quality assurance. Since it's linear work without hard thinking it became this sort of muscle memory thing. I remember some different projects, voice assistant for some car company that gave directions and took commands to change settings in the car, neural net for dog pictures, helpfulness and accuracy of search results, map stuff ,a big excel that I translated last minute to swedish and got like a bonus for doing late at night for them, probably other stuff as well. Wasn't worth it for the time spent getting up to context to work on a task and really low pay but fun to infer company secrets from tasks that I worked on

AndrewKemendo3• 3 years ago

This is because the data is fundamentally and inextricably embedded with anti-social sentiments[1]: language embedded with sentiments reflecting competition and fear rather than cooperation and mutual aid sentiments.

All that nightmare data (which we generate, look I'm doing it now), is a reflection of the joys and traumas of people writing it, and if the majority of the NLP chat data is anti-social then there is no possible other outcome.

You cannot fix this with more "filtering" as the data is embedded in almost all written text. You have to change the sentiment.

[1]https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-2016/projects/cs224w-...

catiopatio2• 3 years ago

Why is this work worth more money than Google is currently paying?

This is not a job that requires rare or difficult to acquire skills, nor is there a shortage of people willing to do the work.

The main subject — who appears to work from home and set his own hours — complains that his hourly wage is $2 less than his daughter working in fast food.

I’d argue she has a much more demanding job.

Minimum wage ‘ghosts’ keep AI arms race from becoming a nightmare

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