(AmericanProsperity.com) – A new app has taken the public by storm, quickly growing in popularity. ChatGPT, released in November 2022, garnished over a million users in its first week, with many hailing it as one of the year’s most impressive innovations in technology. The new artificial intelligence (AI) is making waves in more than one way according to recent revelations.
Success Story
An exclusive report from Time reveals OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, is currently communicating with investors about raising $29 billion, with a possible $10 billion investment coming from Microsoft. If successful, OpenAI, which was founded in 2015, would become one of the world’s most valuable AI companies in the world.
Nonetheless, to get where it did, OpenAI outsourced moderation work to Kenyan laborers. Despite how important the work was to ChatGPT and OpenAI’s success, the company only paid the workers up to $2 an hour.
OpenAI had previous success with ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-3, which was able to string sentences together efficiently. The earlier AI had one critical flaw. It had a tendency to blurt out remarks that were either violent, racist, sexist, or a combination of the three.
This time however, OpenAI took the necessary precautions to ensure ChatGPT wouldn’t follow in its predecessor’s footsteps. Though it cost the company very little money, the moderation still came at a significant cost.
Working for OpenAI
ChatGPT’s parent company outsourced its moderation work to the San Francisco-based Sama, a company that also employs people in Kenya, Uganda, and India. Sama has marketed itself as an “ethical AI” business. Yet, given the company’s average pay, some people are calling foul. While higher paid employees make $2 an hour, inexperienced or poor-performing workers earn as little as $1.32 per hour.
Kenyans working for Sama earned more than the country’s national yearly average, making $2,851 compared to the typical salary of $1,979 in 2021, but the work they did took a significant toll on them. One worker described the job as “torture.” Employees mentioned being subjected to explicit and sometimes violent adult content. Sama also moderated content for Facebook, where employees again were subjected to viewing disturbing content. In that case, workers were paid only $1.50 per hour.
A spokesperson for OpenAI declared that Sama was in charge of paying employees and offering mental health services. The person claimed they were of the understanding the workers at Sama were offered counseling, the ability to opt out of working with no penalty, and a limit to how much explicit content individuals would be subjected to. Additionally, OpenAI claimed sensitive content was being handled by employees with the proper training to do so.
On top of the mental stress that accompanied viewing such content, workers were reportedly expected to meet unrealistic goals, such as being able to read through and review between 150 and 250 passages all in a single nine-hour shift. Many employees claimed to be emotionally injured by the work they did, mentioning the only counseling they were able to receive was in group sessions. Many workers didn’t receive any mental help due to the high demand for productivity.
As innovative as AI can be, there’s a dark side to it. It is the price people pay to give the public a clean-cut version of innovative AI technology.
~Here’s to Your Prosperity!
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