AI companies want you to think their AI will magically replace all those annoying human employees. In reality, AI runs on low-paid labor — lots of it. Actual people are needed to tag and label photos and classify text.
60 Minutes did a great show on this last Sunday. Kenyan classifiers have been working for two years to expose what’s going on behind the curtain. [CBS; YouTube]
US wages are too high, so the richest companies in the world turn to countries with low-wage populations, such as Kenya — with an English-speaking workforce and high unemployment.
OpenAI, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft don’t hire directly. They outsource to vendors such as Sama. This insulates their reputations from the frequently abusive labor practices — even as they dictate them. OpenAI pays Sama $12.50/hour. The workers get $2/hour or less.
The jobs are draining. Deadlines are unrealistic and punitive. Workers have mere seconds to complete complicated labeling tasks. “Honestly, it’s like modern-day slavery,” one worker told 60-Minutes. “We were walking on eggshells,” said another.
Some workers are forced to view violent scenes of rape, murder, bestiality, and incest for hours a day. [Guardian, 2023]
The workers are hired per project, but they say Sama would push them to finish jobs faster than projects required.
OpenAI has used Kenyan workers since 2022. By 2023, workers were protesting the disturbing work of building ChatGPT’s safety filters. In May 2024, the African Content Moderators Union asked President Biden to look into what OpenAI was doing. [Time, 2023; MediaNama, 2023; WSJ, 2023, archive; letter; Wired, archive]
