The company that created Chat GPT made its subcontractors’ employees read a text about violence, child sexual abuse, and interference with animals for less than two dollars an hour.
17:35•Updated 17:58
The Chat GPT artificial intelligence bot, released in November, was cleaned from rough material using questionable means, says Time magazine (you switch to another service).
Since the artificial intelligence is trained to create text based on material found online, its output may contain sexual abuse, hate speech and violence.
The predecessor of Chat GPT sometimes produced harsh text, which is why it was not a sales success. When creating the new version, the Open AI company wanted to get rid of that.
So Open AI decided to develop another artificial intelligence that would warn Chat GPT about suspicious text. That new artificial intelligence had to search for raw material on the web in order to learn to recognize unwanted text and warn Chat GPT about it.
Open AI outsourced the identification and marking of suspicious text to the Sama company. Its Kenyan employees began going through the texts, some of which seemed to come from the dark web, according to Time magazine.
The net salary of the Kenyan who reviewed the texts was 1.32-2 USD per hour (1.2-1.9 EUR).
The work was so traumatizing that the subcontractor withdrew
Some of the texts reviewed by the employees described in detail, for example, sexual abuse of children, interference with animals, murders, suicides and torture.
The work was so traumatizing that Sama ended cooperation with Open AI eight months after the agreement earlier last February.
Time magazine interviewed four Kenyans, all of whom said they were emotionally scarred by their work. One of the employees told how he was shocked after reading a description of interfering with an animal in a space where a small child was also present.
– Reading was torture. When you read something like that all week, by Friday it’s a mess, the employee described.
The same company defends itself by stating that the employees were offered therapy. The employees, on the other hand, considered the amount of therapy insufficient.
Time magazine has investigated the contracts between Open AI and Sama. They show that Open AI paid Sama $12.50 an hour, which is 6 to 9 times the net hourly wages of Kenyan workers.
The matter was reported in Finland earlier Helsingin Sanomat (you switch to another service).