The African workers driving the AI revolution, for about a dollar an hour

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/06/mercy-anita-african-workers-ai-artificial-intelligence-exploitation-feeding-machine

by rntn • 2 years ago

79 60 2 years ago

theguardian.com

teractiveodular2• 2 years ago

Nobody ever leaves the BPO willingly – there’s nothing else to do. She sees her ex-colleagues when she’s on her way to work, hawking vegetables on the market or trying to sell popcorn by the side of the road. If there were other opportunities, people would seize them. She just has to keep her head down, hit her targets, and make sure that whatever happens, she doesn’t get laid off.

And this is the kicker: it's all very well for us to wring our hands about how their conditions could be better, but people are voluntarily choosing to do jobs like this because it's still better than the alternatives. Staring at video footage for 8 hours a day to get paid a dollar an hour sucks, but it sucks less than walking around in a traffic jam in the African sun, trying to hawk bags of popcorn to drivers and constantly risking getting run over with no certainty of getting paid.

mthld4• 2 years ago

Yeah. Look at all the benefits of colonization in African countries. Look at the great job we are doing. Giving them money to alienate themselves looking at the shit we produce. Such a great advancement for humanity. Thanks lord for bringing civilization to the savages

infecto2• 2 years ago

No doubt the impact of Europe on Africa has hurt but are brining jobs to Africa a bad thing? At this point Africa probably receives more harm from its own residents than outside influences.

Nobody said anything about savages. Please don’t bring negativity into a conversation.

TulliusCicero2• 2 years ago

Trade and colonization aren't the same thing. People are taking these jobs because they're better than the alternative, sad as it is.

If developed countries all refused to outsource work like this to poorer countries, do you think that would help the condition of the people there?

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for better working conditions, but ultimately that is primarily the responsibility of the government(s) of that country.

solveit• 2 years ago

Your rhetoric falls flat against any infant mortality chart.

alienate themselves

Sounds like a first-world problem to me.

notjoemama2• 2 years ago

I just read this covering the history of Kenya’s colonialism and independence. (Mercy, from the article, works for a Meta office in Nairobi, Kenya)

https://www.britannica.com/place/Kenya/Kenya-colony

What about the last 60 years free of colonial rule connects to the current state today? Do you think these corporate interests stem from Kenya’s Building Bridges Initiative?

I ask because I recently listened to a podcast about China’s Belt and Road Initiative winding down in Africa. I was surprised to hear this because they had committed to a large infusion of capital with some future trade partnerships (tens of billions at least). It was set to be a massive boon for much of Africa after the US reduced its economic aid in the region. Their reasoning was (economic woes in China aside), they found too much was unstable, specifically legislatively and socially. Permits and licenses drug out where most of the time it was difficult to know which official was in charge of which responsibilities. Also, they would build a facility that would be repeatedly attacked and destroyed by warlords in the area. I believe they said it was common to lose workers to independent gangs.

Just wondering if you could expand on what you said so I can connect the same dots. I’m not understanding your critique.

dyauspitr2• 2 years ago

I honestly think African workers should continue to get “exploited” like this. This is the exact same way China got exploited and that let them bootstrap their entire roaring economy. Not to mention, hawking at intersections isn’t as bad as it gets in some parts of Africa. Literally dying of hunger is a possibility too.

booleandilemma• 2 years ago

Will it work for Africa or is there too much corruption there?

coffeebeqn2• 2 years ago

I’m also not sure what’s the problem. We’ve been doing globalization for decades and it sounds like they pay market rate for office jobs where not many (office) jobs exist. Manufacturing has been much worse of a work environment and we seem to have gotten over that collectively

mxkopy• 2 years ago

Don’t you think it’s kind of crazy that we are on the brink of understanding some fundamental things about cognition and what we seem to be most interested in are hotel bookings and product recommendations?

Pity or what have you aside this is a massive L no matter how you take it

drivingmenuts• 2 years ago

The things we think we'll learn about cognition will only benefit a few people. Rhe rest of us still have to live our lives, if we can, pretty much the same as we always have.

loki-ai• 2 years ago

They don’t know that. I knew a guy who was into this kind of gore, and some of those images stuck with me for weeks. Most people have no idea how brutal and repulsive it can be until they start seeing them.

teractiveodular2• 2 years ago

The ethics of content moderation are indeed tricky, but I'm specifically referring to the other case presented, where they're just watching footage of cars driving around all day.

infecto2• 2 years ago

Sounds like a decent wage for that part of the world. Looks like on the medium-high end folks are making $600 a month there. Not sure how many hours worked but conservatively towards the high end that works out to $3-4 an hour.

MuffinFlavored• 2 years ago

What does $600/mo afford people over there that they can't get with $300/mo, $150/mo, $75/mo, etc?

codeforafrica2• 2 years ago

A bigger house with tap water, indoor plumbing and electricity, a fridge, and maybe even a stove or a washing machine. Oh, and they can send their kids to a better school.

codeforafrica2• 2 years ago

I think it's actually a bad idea to pay much more than that. If you do then local companies can no longer compete for these workers because they could not afford them, and once used to a high salary the workers would not want to work for less.

Lerc2• 2 years ago

The article says $200 a month for the AI annotation job in Uganda. Median income appears to be $70(2012 data, so maybe now $100 after inflation)

Havoc2• 2 years ago

Minimum wage is 120 so at normal hours 160 is above but also not massively

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

The average monthly HOUSEHOLD income in Kenya is ~$160/mo and ~$250/mo in Nairobi [0]. Uganda is even poorer than Kenya.

$1 per hour is around market rate for this kind of a role (some kind of college education).

This kind of BPO work is how Kenya (and Uganda - they're using the same model) graduate up the services ladder.

Edit: these are employees in a Tier 4 city in Uganda. $200/mo is a great salary in a rural town like Gulu.

[0] https://reall.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Understanding-H...

IG_Semmelweiss• 2 years ago

The 1st two paragraphs of the article are brutal. A surreal way to start a narrative. Is that even real ? Sounds like it belongs in a movie script.

alephnerd2• 2 years ago

It's an excerpt from a book. A lot of Guardian "articles" are just excerpts like this or op-eds.

They know their market.

j453• 2 years ago

It's real.

Maybe it's surreal in part because it's so far removed from the end users receiving the benefits.

Lerc2• 2 years ago

It certainly doesn't portray a typical or common occurrence. It's depicting a traumatic situation akin to an emergency worker having to deal with a loved one as a patient.

This does happen. It is also rare, but mostly unavoidable because it can't be predicted. The best that can be offered is support for traumatized people. The support the article says was offered was clearly insufficient, but after a sensationalized opening such as that, I end up doubting the credibility of the article as a whole.

Worker welfare is an important issue, world-wide. I feel like books like the one this article comes from are just finding a new way to exploit these people.

foobarbecue• 2 years ago

Yeah, I don't understand how this would happen. These moderators are viewing stuff from all over the world, right? So how would this one person be assigned stuff from her own neighborhood -- not just one item, but many? It seems almost impossible, unless for some reason they're assigning people stuff from their areas.

exabrial2• 2 years ago

Why not just pay Unionized American Workers?

kelnos• 2 years ago

Tired of the "shock" headlines like this: a dollar an hour isn't good or bad unless you know the context and local cost of living. Seems like that's a decent wage for those parts of the world?

The actually objectionable bit is that these jobs traumatize people over time, and desensitize them to the disturbing content they watch as a part of the job. Would I choose this over spending my day out in the heat, trying to sell food, snacks, or other wares, subject to the risk of pedestrian accidents or violent theft? Maybe?

Ideally there could just be better jobs available all around, but some people who live there might consider this at least somewhat better than some of the alternative jobs they'd otherwise be working.

Our current way of building models requires a large training data set that is already tagged/classified by humans. Unless the technology somehow improves so this is no longer necessary, these jobs are necessary. One bright spot is that once these models are trained, then humans can be out of the loop, which is certainly better than not having the models at all, and having to employ people, in perpetuity, to watch all of this content and directly make moderation decisions.

But perhaps the question we should be asking is: should we just completely do without, and never subject people to these kinds of jobs, no matter what the purpose? Maybe video, photo, etc. sharing on this scale just shouldn't exist if we have to put humans through miserable work in order to do moderation. But I don't really see this changing. So if we continue to employ people to train our AI models, can we get to a point where our future models can be used to bootstrap/train more sophisticated models, without the need for further human classification of the training data?

baggy_trough2• 2 years ago

If we did without and these jobs went away, those people would be worse off. So no.

deadbolt• 2 years ago

Yeah there's no way to improve these people's lives without subjecting them to hours and hours of watching the worst content imaginable /s

Havoc2• 2 years ago

Seems like that's a decent wage for those parts of the world?

20 eight hour days at 1 dollar is not much higher than Kenya’s minimum wage (around 120 a month)

Not terrible I guess but also not great even by 3rd world local standards

To make it count as decent you’d need to go somewhere poorer than Kenya

worstspotgain3• 2 years ago

Sounds like the type of labor-intensive scheme that suits a developing economy. If labor is abundant and capital is scarce, what you don't want are capital-intensive jobs (e.g. semiconductor fab operator) even if the wage is 100x higher. Once everyone is employed, the bidding will begin and wages will rise. [1]

Training AI is also way better than undermining Western democracy... [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-sector_model

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...

mikae13• 2 years ago

Sounds like the type of labor-intensive scheme that suits a developing economy.

Much of this work does not suit any living human.

https://www.ft.com/content/ef42e78f-e578-450b-9e43-36fbd1e20...

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbo...

worstspotgain3• 2 years ago

The FT link is paywalled, the other articles just echo the article at the top. There's a worker who apparently filed the equivalent of a wrongful termination suit in Kenya. There are many of those every day in the developed world too, and it may well be meritorious. He claims he was scarred by the content he had to look at, but Americans review objectionable social media content too (or at least used to.)

Since these workers are not indentured serfs, we should generally rely on their ability to switch jobs. To me, this looks like some reporters hounding in on anything that smacks of big-bad-wolf AI.

As for it being work that doesn't suit any living human, it seems a bit hyperbolic. Maybe you've been less exposed to reports of what life is like in the developing world than I have? Here's something that was on PBS the other day: https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/09/29/philippines-children-ris... Of course it's not a company in the developed world that commissions this, but everyone knows whose necklaces the gold is ending up in.

I think we should avoid knee-jerk reactions against AI, which arguably has more potential to help the developing world than anything since electricity, and maybe look more into who benefits if AI is held back.

radarsat12• 2 years ago

I find it a bit odd how this article conflates content moderation for social network with AI training. Of course there is a relationship there but these are not the same thing. The article gives lots of examples of trauma caused by content moderation and then blames it on the needs of AI. If anything, if we could satisfactorily train an AI for content moderation then humans wouldn't need to be in the loop (as much) so it's a weird thing to just put these ideas together like that, and is clearly just trying to feed the current zeitgeist of "AI bad".

j453• 2 years ago

Is it odd?

AI being trained for content moderation for social media...

Social media seems to be downstream from training AI to recognize and categorize content.

radarsat12• 2 years ago

Sure but my point is that you could write exactly the same article without mentioning AI at all, since the majority of examples are about content moderation for social media.

Meanwhile the only connection to AI is that it might provide a potential reduction in the need for this.

So what is odd to me is positioning this as the purpose being for feeding the ever hungry data needs of evil algorithms, because as far as I can tell without those algorithms these jobs would still exist and would be worse.

dfadsadsf2• 2 years ago

I worked on tooling and organization of those queues for several companies so I am very familiar with the topic. This article is a bit misleading and contains mostly half-truths

- Queues with gore and violations pay more than regular queue. You can be paid $X/hour for marking traffic lanes or roughly $1.5-1.8X for looking at somebody getting killed. This is personal choice and some people handle it better than others. If you have high empathy, you should absolutely not do it. On the other hand 5% of population are psychopaths with inhibited empathy and they do not care. This is similar to real life jobs - what you see in queues is not that different from what police see day to day in downtown SF or South Chicago.

- Same goes for sexually-explicit/porn queues. If you are 18 year old male you should absolutely not do them - it will fuck up your sexuality (similar to watching porn 8 hours/day). You will also burn out in a couple weeks anyway. The most success we saw was with 50+ year old women working from home - some worked on those queues for years.

- From the article you will notice that Africans worked on African countries queues/moderation - so it's not even imperialism or whatever where they worked on rating rich-countries content. They rated their fellow Africans.

- Africa is not that big in content moderation. Reliable coachable people are hard to find and infrastructure is not great. Salaries are also pretty high - I am not sure where they find workers for $1/hour but we paid significantly more. India does way more moderation, people are more reliable and overall it's much easier to work with Indian BPO.

xigoi• 2 years ago

On the other hand 5% of population are psychopaths with inhibited empathy and they do not care.

Do you want psychopaths to be the ones to determine what content is too violent?

dfadsadsf2• 2 years ago

Guidelines are written by product, legal, privacy, comms, policy and other folks in HQ - raters (psychopath or not) do not really influence them. Guidelines in my experience suffer from "design by committee" syndrome but everyone working on them is pretty empathetic and genuinely tries to do best inside constraints.

Acceptable/Unacceptable violence is clearly defined in guidelines with examples - no moral judgement from rater is required.

On raters - they are doing pretty mechanical work and we generally do robust quality checks. Some % of tasks are randomly sent to two raters and if there is disagreement, task is sent to auditor. Raters with high disagreement rate with auditor are coached and if disagreement rate contienues to be high, they are fired.

Overall quality is controlled by using "golden set" - tasks that have "right" answer decided by HQ. We look at disagreement between raters and right answer.

There are other ways to control for quality - this is all pretty standard and everyone is doing the same things. Does not really matter if rater is phychopath or not if he can follow guidelines.

TacticalCoder• 2 years ago

This particular video was of a fatal car crash.

An uncle of mine died in a car crash, in the late 80s / early 90s. The first thing my father did was drive for hours, to the place where the crash happened, and film. He then went and filmed the car wreck with its blood stains and grass stuck between the tires and the rims. A 230 km/h // 140 mph+ crash: driver lost control.

And although he could barely speak while filming he warned us in the video that this was what would happen to us if we were to act like idiots on the road.

And he, of course, forced us to watch that vid. Immediately and then a few more times at regular intervals months/years later. Best road safety lesson we ever got.

Every single person I ever crossed on the road in my life can thank my father for filming and forcing me to watch that vid.

At times there are very smart families who do allow the publication of videos of crashes where a family member died and say it's to act as a warning as to what may happen when you drive drunk/intoxicated/crazy.

It should be outlawed that families may decide that these vids are not publishable. It happened on public roads: it should be public material, as a warning to the public.

That these are not allowed on social media is criminal for these vids are the best lessons kids / teenagers can ever get when it comes to road safety.

And it is delusional to think that kids/teenagers watch that for morbid reasons: they watch such vids because their survival instinct want to make sense of what's happening.

"If you act like that, you'll kill people and/or die" is quite the lesson.

sodality2• 2 years ago

This isn’t a crazy notion. My high school, as well as probably thousands of others, staged a crash and EMS rescue to have us all realize the danger of driving impaired. The difference is it was in a monitored setting - I don’t think young children should be exposed to this on an app that everyone is using, without the comfort of their parents. Even in your example, your father showed it to you. But watching extremely graphically violent videos from a young age with zero healthy avenues to process it is a recipe for disaster.

randerson• 2 years ago

I've learned a lot from watching non-fatal accidents and close calls on /r/IdiotsInCars. I'm not sure I'd be better off if these were graphic or of someone I know.

What maddens me about social media is that they're OK hosting videos of their users driving recklessly on public roads and getting away with it. It normalizes dangerous driving, even glorifies it since these idiots attract millions of followers. Instagram for example doesn't even have a category to report this content.

miki123211• 2 years ago

And it is delusional to think that kids/teenagers watch that for morbid reasons

Most don't, but there's apparently a very small subgroup that feeds on this kind of content. Algorithms can detect that of course and feed them even more of these videos, getting them even deeper into the rabbit hole.

You can't blame it all on the algorithms either, if you build an algorithm that finds relationships like "a likes x, b likes x and y, recommend y to a", this is what you get in some pathological cases, along with pedophiles seeing family videos of kids in swimming pools.

rldjbpin• 2 years ago

see related - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40623629 (Cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English from the same site; 98 comments)

exabrial2• 2 years ago

Good thing all of these AI Companies renamed their "master" branches to "main", that really solved the problem here of inequality.

The African workers driving the AI revolution, for about a dollar an hour

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