The Grunt Work Behind AI: How Contract Workers Are Essential in Teaching ChatGPT and Other AI Systems
Alexej Savreux, a 34-year-old from Kansas City, has done all sorts of jobs, from making fast-food sandwiches to sound work for live theater. But now he’s an artificial intelligence trainer, one of the many contract workers who teach AI systems to analyze data and generate text and images. Savreux and others have spent countless hours teaching OpenAI’s systems to improve the accuracy of ChatGPT. Their feedback fills an endless need for the company and its AI competitors. This work is often anonymous, unsteady, and lacks benefits.
According to the Partnership on AI, this is a new job that’s being created by AI, which has the potential to be a high-quality job. However, contract workers often feel overlooked and undervalued. The Partnership on AI has warned that a spike in demand is coming for data enrichment work. It recommended that the industry commit to fair compensation and other imitative practices. Unfortunately, so far, DeepMind is the only tech company to publicly commit to those guidelines.
Despite the challenges of the job, Savreux sees it as necessary laborious jobs. He got into AI contracting after seeing an online job posting. He credits the AI gig work with helping to pull him out of homelessness. The job is entry-level, but it pays more than the minimum wage in Kansas City.
Job postings for AI contractors refer to both the allure of working in a cutting-edge industry, as well as the sometimes grinding nature of the work. There’s no definitive tally of how many contractors work for AI companies, but it’s an increasingly common form of work around the world. OpenAI has hired about 1,000 remote contractors from Eastern Europe and Latin America in places to label data or train the company software on computer engineering tasks.
While the work of creating data to train AI models isn’t always simple, it does offer a sneak peak into where generative AI technology is headed in the near-term. Jatin Kumar, a 22-year-old from Austin, Texas, has been working on AI contracts since he graduated from college with a degree in computer science. Kumar said his main work has been generating conversational structures for OpenAI’s API, which can create text on demand. Kumar is also working on his own tech startup, Bonsai, which is making software to help with hospital billing.
AI contract work hasn’t yet inspired a similar movement in the U.S. among Americans quietly building AI systems word-by-word, but some AI contract workers are organizing, citing low pay and the mental toll of the work. In Nairobi, Kenya, more than 150 people who’ve worked on AI for Facebook, TikTok, and ChatGPT have voted to form a union.
Editor Notes: While AI has brought many new and exciting opportunities, we must remember the importance of fair compensation and respect for contract workers. The work these individuals do is essential in building AI systems, and they deserve to be valued for their contributions. Organizations like the Partnership on AI are leading the charge in encouraging tech companies to commit to fair compensation and improved practices for their contract workers. To stay informed about AI industry news, check out GPT News Room.
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