OpenAI has outsourced the content moderation work to train ChatGPT to an American company that disregards its employees. The Time website tells the story of the little people who made the success of the chatbot possible.
ChatGPT, the almost omniscient chatbot is currently causing a stir. As often happens, the glowing notoriety conceals its dark side. Its designer, OpenAI would have entrusted the moderation of the language model used to form ChatGPT to an American company named Sama. The latter counts Google, Meta and Microsoft among its most prestigious clients. Sama employees had to mission to label hundreds of thousands of pieces of text taken from the web.
A most thankless task, because according to Time, ” much of this text seems to have been pulled from the darkest corners of the internet. Some described situations in graphic detail such as child sexual abuse, bestiality, murders, suicides, torture, self-harm and incest”. We understand better why the job of moderator increases the risk of developing mental illnesses. Sama’s employees have not even had the satisfaction of being properly remunerated. In fact, their salary did not exceed $2 an hour, whereas the minimum hourly wage for a Californian moderator would have been around $17.
Moderators were paid $2 per hour to filter out atrocities submitted to ChatGPT
In February 2022, Sama closes its offices in Nairobi, and lays off everyone. OpenAI made the same mistake as Meta by calling on Sama, a company is sadly known for the poor working conditions it imposes on its employees. Although company officials say the decision was made due to a tense international economic climate, many observers believe the closure is primarily due to lawsuits against Meta and Sama since May 2022.
This bad publicity does not prevent investors from rushing to OpenAI and ChatGPT. Microsoft has shown interest in this technology. The Redmond firm not only wants to integrate it into Microsoft 365, but it would also like to invest $10 billion in OpenAI and become its majority shareholder.
Source : Time
