Open AI, the founding company of the chabot based on artificial intelligence, would have called on Kenyan workers paid two dollars an hour to make its system less toxic, denounces an investigation by Time.
“It was torture”, Kenyan workers testify in a survey published by the Time. This reveals that Open AI has called on Sama, a company that employs underpaid employees in traumatic conditions.
ChatGPT fascinates with its ability to provide accurate and complete answers while its knowledge is based on the content that abounds on the Internet. Indeed, the artificial intelligence has been trained according to hundreds of billions of words extracted from the Web, representing a vast repository of human language. But it was necessary to sort this information to minimize the risk of writing racist, sexist comments, or even publishing a shocking text.
the Time indicates that to achieve this, Open AI was inspired by the methods of Facebook and would have signed three contracts with a partner of the social network: the company Sama. This company notably employs workers in Kenya and boasts of having lifted 50,000 people out of poverty around the world.
For 200,000 dollars, Sama had to sort out content deemed shocking, ranging from texts of sexual abuse to hate speech. According to testimony, the employees received only 1.32 to 2 dollars per hour against the 12.50 dollars indicated in the contract between the two companies.
“Recurring Visions”
The outlet also reviewed hundreds of pages of internal Sama and OpenAI documents, including workers’ pay stubs, and interviewed four Sama employees. Thus, Kenyan employees report having “recurring visions” after reading traumatic texts, often of a sexual nature, for days.
The partnership between the two companies began in November 2021 before abruptly ending in February 2022, eight months earlier than planned. OpenAI would also have asked Sama to sort images for its Dall-E image generator.
For its part, OpenAI assures the American media that the company had not set any productivity objectives and that Sama was responsible for managing salaries and the mental health of employees. And to add: “we take the mental health of our employees and that of our contractors very seriously (…) exposure to explicit content has a limit and sensitive information is handled by specifically trained workers .”
Open AI is already working on a next version of ChatGPT which will collect even more data.
