[HN Gopher] African Workers for ChatGPT, TikTok and Facebook Vot...
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African Workers for ChatGPT, TikTok and Facebook Vote to Unionize
Author : jaredwiener
Score : 65 points
Date : 2023-05-02 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (time.com)
| nimbius wrote:
| "African Workers for ChatGPT"
|
| this reveal is easily worth more than the union itself. If you
| were a futurist, a FAANG thought leader or an evangelist for AI,
| this should be all you need to know to realize ChatGPT isnt the
| future.
|
| if youre using chatgpt in a call center, then this is just H1B or
| other labor fraud with more steps.
| neilv wrote:
| Good for them.
|
| There have been some awful stories about how difficult -- and
| sometimes traumatic -- the content moderation work can be.
|
| When content moderation of really nasty stuff is necessary,
| people doing it should be getting proper safeguards, care,
| compensation, and respect.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Don't worry, content moderation for most services, will be
| performed by GPTs in max 2 years. Pretty sure GPT-4 already
| exceeds human labellers on average for simple moderation tasks
| (ie facebook comments, not say reddit communities with fine
| nuance).
|
| The only moderation workers left, will be for the AI companies,
| and the efficiency here is train once-use multiple times.
|
| If you are going to outsource that function to some other
| country, might as well outsource it to GPT, cheaper faster
| better, with no ethical concerns or bad press.
|
| So those workers don't have to experience those traumas again!
| They do however have to experience the trauma of unemployment.
| So be careful what you wish for.
| version_five wrote:
| Getting ML to reliably do something specific like flag an
| image as inappropriate is (a) already well known in the field
| (b) impossible to do reliably and not getting easier, which
| is exactly why these comment moderation places exist.
| Otherwise we'd already be doing it. None of the recent
| advances are in a direction that brings us closer to being
| able to do this.
|
| I think you're probably in the majority though who
| misunderstands what gpt et al are doing and think of them as
| an advance in ML generally as opposed to just a different
| demo that works most of the time.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Are you sure about that? We haven't seen what GPT-4
| multimodal can do in the wild, it can even take into
| context the full conversation history in addition to just
| the images. If it can understand visual jokes easily, are
| you sure it can't detect CSAM?
|
| We can also reliably GENERATE inappropriate content now, by
| simply adding a 'nsfw' tag to Stable diffusion, it flips a
| normal image to an inappropriate one. It doesn't sound very
| difficult to reverse this.
|
| Also, for these services, you don't need it to be perfect.
| If even the flagging accuracy goes up significantly, that's
| a lot fewer human workers to review it.
|
| The AI ecosystem as a whole is also booming massively
| regarding hardware, datasets, talent, software
| infrastructure. So that makes development in traditional ML
| faster.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| A drop.
|
| A trickle.
|
| Then a flood.
|
| The labor movement is resurging and rightly so.
|
| We need to welcome this or prepare for violent revolution
| globally.
|
| Wealth inequality is cyclical with the same outcomes throughout
| history - voluntary or violent wealth redistribution.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| > We need to welcome this or prepare for violent revolution
| globally.
|
| I don't know about you, but I kinda like being an extremely
| over-paid American software developer. Why would I welcome
| this?
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| Because you care about people other than yourself?
| geodel wrote:
| I love violent revolutions, they always lead to lovely results
| where ever or whenever they occur.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| (GP's comment does not appear to be advocating for violent
| revolutions.)
| thebradbain wrote:
| Well, they usually end up with the people everyone was most
| angry at for causing the circumstances that lead up to the
| revolution powerless or dead, as an explicit aim.
|
| So regardless of who ends up in charge after or if that
| regime succeeds, you can't say revolutions themselves are not
| frighteningly effective. After all, every existing country on
| earth is the result of a revolution against the leaders of
| its past.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Depends on whether the real goal is "kill those people" or
| "make a better life for the rest of us". The first is easy;
| the second is harder.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Definitely should not have shot at those redcoats
| motohagiography wrote:
| How is this not literally just a threat to rob people if they
| don't give up their stuff, and why would anyone take it as
| anything less?
| anonylizard wrote:
| Please stop fantasizing about 'global revolutions'.
|
| Wealth redistribution movements can successfully happen within
| national borders, or even within tightly knit groups of nations
| (say EU, or NAFTA).
|
| But there will never be any solidarity between say US and
| African workers, heck there won't even be any solidarity
| between Indian and African workers. China in particular
| violently suppresses unions because they believed it'll result
| in China outcompeting all other developing countries in
| manufacturing, which is exactly what happened.
|
| If AI is to replace white collar jobs, the outsourced white
| collar jobs (low precision, low criticality) will be the first
| to go. Replaced by one person in the home country doing the job
| of 5-10 in the past. This fact alone crushes any sympathy
| across borders.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > But there will never be any solidarity between say US and
| African workers
|
| Why not? If post-covid economics has a theme, it's that
| things are more interconnected and more fragile than we
| expected. That fragility is also opportunity.
|
| I can imagine scenarios where overpaid tech workers in the US
| --rather than striking themselves--instead pay underpaid
| miners (in Africa, say) to strike, which cascades to hold up
| manufacturing, which cascades to harm their eventual target.
| erulabs wrote:
| Just in time for re-shoring jobs to become a popular topic. I
| fear these workers may have bit the extremely frugal hand that
| feeds.
| cieucudhg wrote:
| Wish them the best but they only have their jobs because of
| outsourcing-- they're the cheapest labor available. Ask for too
| much and the jobs will go to India or anywhere else.
| anonylizard wrote:
| Yeah, they have quite a sad understanding of their bargaining
| power.
|
| 1. Their job easily replaceable by any english speaking, high
| school educated worker on a planetary level.
|
| 2. There is almost no capital expenditure to setup a
| 'moderation centre', just setup a bunch of computers in an
| office and you are done. So workers don't have leverage over a
| company that is unwilling to move.
|
| 3. AI will annihilate probably 80% of the offshore call center
| business in a few years, the workers laid off from call
| centers, can 1-1 slot into these AI-RL training jobs. Heck AI
| will also annihilate 80% of those offshore moderation jobs for
| say facebook. So more competition.
|
| Frankly, the AI companies doesn't even need to move to another
| country, they can just hire non-unionized workers in those same
| african countries. When they will do this, depends on when the
| union asks for too high of a wage.
|
| The most optimistic outcome, is the unions try to work with the
| AI companies in asking for better conditions, but not
| neccessarily much better wages. Overplay their hand and they
| will fail.
| yawboakye wrote:
| [flagged]
| htk wrote:
| Talk about a job that can be replaced by AI in the near future.
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