‘Overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI

Are other AI companies doing the same thing? Would like to see more articles about this...

There's a YouTube video titled "AI is a hype-fueled dumpster fire" [0] that mentions OpenAI's shenanigans. I haven't fact checked that but I've heard enough stories to believe it.

[0] https://youtu.be/0bF_AQvHs1M?si=rpMG2CY3TxnG3EYQ

Scale AI’s entire business model was using people in developing countries to label data for training models. Once you look into it, it comes across as rather predatory.

This was one of the first links I found re: Scale’s labor practices https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/22/scale-ai-is-facing-a-third...

Here’s another: https://relationaldemocracy.medium.com/an-authoritarian-work...

Couple of months ago I received a job invite for Kotlin AI trainers from the team at Upwork. I asked what the job is about and she says something like "for the opportunity to review & evaluate content for generative AI." And I'm from a developed country too.

There's nontrivial historical precedent for this exact playbook: when a new paradigm (Lisp machines and GOFAI search, GPU backprop, softmax self-attention) is scaling fast, a lot of promises get made, a lot of national security money gets involved, and AI Summer is just balmy.

But the next paradigm breakthrough is hard to forecast, and the current paradigm's asymptote is just as hard to predict, so it's +EV to say "tomorrow" and "forever".

When the second becomes clear before the first, you turk and expert label like it's 1988 and pray that the next paradigm breakthrough is soon, you bridge the gap with expert labeling and compute until it works or you run out of money and the DoD guy stops taking your calls. AI Winter is cold.

And just like Game of Thrones, no I mean no one, not Altman, not Amodei, not Allah Most Blessed knows when the seasons in A Song of Math and Grift will change.

Karen Hao's recent book "Empire of AI" about the rise of OpenAI goes into detail how people in Africa and South America were hired (and arguably exploited) for their training efforts.

Can you explain the exploited part?

My understanding is they performed work and were paid for it at market rate. So just regular capitalism. Or was there more to it?

According to the book they kept dropping the rates paid per item forcing people to work ridiculous 12+ hours/day just to get enough to live on, even in the low cost of living places they were in. It was like something in a cyberpunk dystopia but real.

This is a weird sentence, because its got many assumptions baked in that pull the answers in different directions, if they have to conform with the implied definitions you are using.

Global south nations do not have the same level of Judicial recourse, work safety norms, and health infrastructure as does, say, America. So people doing labelling work who then go ahead and kill themselves after getting PTSD, are just costs of doing business.

This can be put under many labels, to transfer the objectionable portion to some other entity or ideology - in your case "capitalism".

That doesn't mean it is actually capitalism. In this case it's exploitating gaps in global legal infrastructure.

I used to bash capitalism happily, but its becoming a white whale, and catch all. We don't even have capitalism anywhere, since you can get far too many definitions for that term today.