OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/ <https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/> [...] In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan laborers earning less than $2 per hour, a TIME investigation has found. [...] To build that safety system, OpenAI took a leaf out of the playbook of social media companies like Facebook, who had already shown it was possible to build AIs that could detect toxic language like hate speech to help remove it from their platforms. The premise was simple: feed an AI with labeled examples of violence, hate speech, and sexual abuse, and that tool could learn to detect those forms of toxicity in the wild. That detector would be built into ChatGPT to check whether it was echoing the toxicity of its training data, and filter it out before it ever reached the user. It could also help scrub toxic text from the training datasets of future AI models. To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest. OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya was Sama, a San Francisco-based firm that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients like Google, Meta and Microsoft. Sama markets itself as an “ethical AI” company and claims to have helped lift more than 50,000<https://www.sama.com/blog/we-are-a-b-corp/> people out of poverty. The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance. For this story, TIME reviewed hundreds of pages of internal Sama and OpenAI documents, including workers’ payslips, and interviewed four Sama employees who worked on the project. All the employees spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for their livelihoods. [...] One Sama worker tasked with reading and labeling text for OpenAI told TIME he suffered from recurring visions after reading a graphic description of a man having sex with a dog in the presence of a young child. “That was torture,” he said. “You will read a number of statements like that all through the week. By the time it gets to Friday, you are disturbed from thinking through that picture.” The work’s traumatic nature eventually led Sama to cancel all its work for OpenAI in February 2022, eight months earlier than planned.

Grazie Damiano, ne approfitto per ricordare che le pratiche di questa AI "né intelligente né artificiale" (per echeggiare il titolo del bel libro di Kate Crawford) sono state abbondantemente documentate, tra gli altri (chiedendo scusa a chi non cito) da Antonio Casilli in "Schiavi del clic". Purtroppo, questo "lato oscuro" dell'AI mi pare sia scarsamente e raramente presente sui media nostrani... Ciao, Enrico Il 18/01/2023 22:52, Damiano Verzulli ha scritto:

Il 18/01/23 18:45, Daniela Tafani ha scritto:

...

OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

[...] In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan laborers earning less than $2 per hour, a TIME investigation has found. [...]

Mi pare una sorta di followup di quanto fu segnalato, sempre dal Time, lo scorso febbraio 2022 [1], puntualmente passato su questa lista grazie ad un messaggio del Prof. Nardelli [2].

Resta in me l'amarezza del non poter far nulla di concreto per (provare a) invertire la rotta [3]

Un saluto, DV

[1] https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-employee-treatme... [2] https://server-nexa.polito.it/pipermail/nexa/2022-February/023317.html [3] https://server-nexa.polito.it/pipermail/nexa/2022-February/023319.html

_______________________________________________ nexa mailing list nexa@server-nexa.polito.it https://server-nexa.polito.it/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nexa --

-- EN https://www.hoepli.it/libro/la-rivoluzione-informatica/9788896069516.html ====================================================== Prof. Enrico Nardelli Presidente di "Informatics Europe" Direttore del Laboratorio Nazionale "Informatica e Scuola" del CINI Dipartimento di Matematica - Università di Roma "Tor Vergata" Via della Ricerca Scientifica snc - 00133 Roma home page: https://www.mat.uniroma2.it/~nardelli blog: https://link-and-think.blogspot.it/ tel: +39 06 7259.4204 fax: +39 06 7259.4699 mobile: +39 335 590.2331 e-mail: nardelli@mat.uniroma2.it online meeting: https://blue.meet.garr.it/b/enr-y7f-t0q-ont ====================================================== --

Grazie molte di aver segnalato di nuovo l'articolo precedente (lo scorso febbraio non ero ancora iscritta a questa lista). Ringrazio anche il professor Nardelli per aver ricordato i lavori di Kate Crawford e Antonio Casilli (è di quest'ultimo l'espressione "intelligenza artificiale fatta a mano", che, come i "SALAMI" di Stefano Quintarelli, per me fa parte ormai del dizionario). Invito sempre gli studenti a leggerli, insieme a Antonio Aloiso, Giuseppe De Stefano, Il tuo capo è un algoritmo. Contro il lavoro disumano, Bari-Roma, Laterza, 2020 How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-crowdworkers-became-ghosts-dig...> (per parlare della sfacciataggine - e, al tempo stesso, onestà intellettuale - del chiamare "Turco meccanico" la propria piattaforma per il lavoro digitale e di “Before the Internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for ten minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those ten minutes. But with technology, you can actually find them, pay them the tiny amount of money, and then get rid of them when you don’t need them anymore.") e Alexandra Mateescu Madeleine Clare Elish, AI in context, the labor of integrating new technologies, Data & Society, 2019 <https://datasociety.net/library/ai-in-context/<https://datasociety.net/library/ai-in-context/>> D'ora in poi, per una sintesi sulla questione, c'è anche The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence <https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor-behind-artificial-intelligence/<https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor-behind-artificial-intelligence/>> Demistificare una narrazione non è l'intera soluzione, ma è senz'altro un'azione concreta. Grazie ancora, un saluto, Daniela ________________________________ Da: nexa <nexa-bounces@server-nexa.polito.it> per conto di Damiano Verzulli <damiano@verzulli.it> Inviato: mercoledì 18 gennaio 2023 22:52 A: nexa@server-nexa.polito.it Oggetto: Re: [nexa] Intelligenza artificiale fatta a mano Il 18/01/23 18:45, Daniela Tafani ha scritto:

OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/

[...] In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan laborers earning less than $2 per hour, a TIME investigation has found. [...]

Mi pare una sorta di followup di quanto fu segnalato, sempre dal Time, lo scorso febbraio 2022 [1], puntualmente passato su questa lista grazie ad un messaggio del Prof. Nardelli [2]. Resta in me l'amarezza del non poter far nulla di concreto per (provare a) invertire la rotta [3] Un saluto, DV [1] https://time.com/6147458/facebook-africa-content-moderation-employee-treatme... [2] https://server-nexa.polito.it/pipermail/nexa/2022-February/023317.html [3] https://server-nexa.polito.it/pipermail/nexa/2022-February/023319.html -- Damiano Verzulli e-mail: damiano@verzulli.it --- possible?ok:while(!possible){open_mindedness++} --- "...I realized that free software would not generate the kind of income that was needed. Maybe in USA or Europe, you may be able to get a well paying job as a free software developer, but not here [in Africa]..." -- Guido Sohne - 1973-2008 http://ole.kenic.or.ke/pipermail/skunkworks/2008-April/005989.html

Daniela Tafani <daniela.tafani@unipi.it> writes: [...]

Demistificare una narrazione non è l'intera soluzione, ma è senz'altro un'azione concreta.

diciamo che chi ben comincia è già a metà dell'opera... e in questo caso secondo me anche oltre la metà se chi "investe" quantità vergognosamente spropositate di risorse (per tutto tranne che per il remunerare degnamente il lavoro umano) nelle applicazioni AI si rendesse conto dell'illusione che sta rincorrendo (incluso rimpiazzare il lavoro umano con sistemi AI), l'intero castello di carte crollerebbe presto attendo con ansia il prossimo "inverno AI" :-) [...] saluti, 380° -- 380° (Giovanni Biscuolo public alter ego) «Noi, incompetenti come siamo, non abbiamo alcun titolo per suggerire alcunché» Disinformation flourishes because many people care deeply about injustice but very few check the facts. Ask me about <https://stallmansupport.org>.