ChatGPT is Powered by $15-an-Hour Contractors (nbcnews.com) 96
An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News:
Alexej Savreux, a 34-year-old in Kansas City, says he's done all kinds of work over the years. He's made fast-food sandwiches. He's been a custodian and a junk-hauler. And he's done technical sound work for live theater.
These days, though, his work is less hands-on: He's an artificial intelligence trainer.
Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze data so they can generate the kinds of text and images that have wowed the people using newly popular products like ChatGPT. To improve the accuracy of AI, he has labeled photos and made predictions about what text the apps should generate next.
The pay: $15 an hour and up, with no benefits... He credits the AI gig work — along with a previous job at the sandwich chain Jimmy John's — with helping to pull him out of homelessness.
"Their feedback fills an urgent and endless need for the company and its AI competitors: providing streams of sentences, labels and other information that serve as training data," the article explains: "A lot of the discourse around AI is very congratulatory," said Sonam Jindal, the program lead for AI, labor and the economy at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that promotes research and education around artificial intelligence. "But we're missing a big part of the story: that this is still hugely reliant on a large human workforce," she said...
A spike in demand has arrived, and some AI contract workers are asking for more. In Nairobi, Kenya, more than 150 people who've worked on AI for Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT voted Monday to form a union, citing low pay and the mental toll of the work, Time magazine reported... Time magazine reported in January that OpenAI relied on low-wage Kenyan laborers to label text that included hate speech or sexually abusive language so that its apps could do better at recognizing toxic content on their own. OpenAI has hired about 1,000 remote contractors in places such as Eastern Europe and Latin America to label data or train company software on computer engineering tasks, the online news outlet Semafor reported in January...
A spokesperson for OpenAI said no one was available to answer questions about its use of AI contractors.
These days, though, his work is less hands-on: He's an artificial intelligence trainer.
Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze data so they can generate the kinds of text and images that have wowed the people using newly popular products like ChatGPT. To improve the accuracy of AI, he has labeled photos and made predictions about what text the apps should generate next.
The pay: $15 an hour and up, with no benefits... He credits the AI gig work — along with a previous job at the sandwich chain Jimmy John's — with helping to pull him out of homelessness.
"Their feedback fills an urgent and endless need for the company and its AI competitors: providing streams of sentences, labels and other information that serve as training data," the article explains: "A lot of the discourse around AI is very congratulatory," said Sonam Jindal, the program lead for AI, labor and the economy at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit based in San Francisco that promotes research and education around artificial intelligence. "But we're missing a big part of the story: that this is still hugely reliant on a large human workforce," she said...
A spike in demand has arrived, and some AI contract workers are asking for more. In Nairobi, Kenya, more than 150 people who've worked on AI for Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT voted Monday to form a union, citing low pay and the mental toll of the work, Time magazine reported... Time magazine reported in January that OpenAI relied on low-wage Kenyan laborers to label text that included hate speech or sexually abusive language so that its apps could do better at recognizing toxic content on their own. OpenAI has hired about 1,000 remote contractors in places such as Eastern Europe and Latin America to label data or train company software on computer engineering tasks, the online news outlet Semafor reported in January...
A spokesperson for OpenAI said no one was available to answer questions about its use of AI contractors.
I for one find this shocking (Score:1, Troll)
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Interesting. I, too, have a job where I do things that would get me arrested if I did them in my spare time...
Lucky him (Score:5, Informative)
he has labeled photos
Wow, he's paid to do that! The rest of us have been tagging fire hydrants and traffic lights in Google's insufferable Recaptchas every 2 minutes for the privilege of being allowed to view a fucking web page for free for years...
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Why is every headline written by 6 year
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Why is every headline written by 6 year olds?
or bots?
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Bots can also be 6 years old.
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What's more, labeling photos does not mean it is "powered by".
If the LLM would cease to adequately function without this labeling effort, then "powered by" is appropriate and correct. If the LLM would continue to adequately function without this labeling effort, then "powered by" is incorrect. Given all the money and effort put into labeling, it seems like the LLM would cease to adequately function without it. It would continue to function at its current level, most likely, but it would not be able to grow its database.
At the very least, this will hopefully drive the
Re:Lucky him (Score:5, Insightful)
Headline 1 "ChatGPT is coming for minimum wage jobs. News at 11."
Headline 2 "ChatGPT creates minimum wage jobs doing tasks it couldn't do. News at 11."
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ChatGPT is not coming for minimum wage jobs. It is coming for medium wage jobs.
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300 million jobs at risk according to Goldman Sachs. And given how AI could conceivably speed up design, testing and manufacture, I don't see why we wouldn't have AI driven robots doing many menial tasks like road sweeping and farm labouring within one to two decades or less.
It seems to me that all of the previous displacements of jobs ended up with people doing white collar work, much of it massively redundant. With AI that won't happen. So many humans seem to have this weird attitude that big bad things c
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It seems to me that all of the previous displacements of jobs ended up with people doing white collar work, much of it massively redundant.
They also ended up with people doing blue collar work to serve those white collar workers, the majority of people now work in a service industry. But when those white collar workers are unemployable because AI has made them redundant, there won't be any money in serving them either.
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I for one welcome our AI overlords.
on a side note the human fodder should start inputting that the minimum wage is 25 dollars just in case any CEO's get smart enough to create a chatGPT account.
Wow, labelling photos (Score:5, Funny)
I can see why the boss wants him back in the office [slashdot.org] - you're gonna miss out on all sorts of dynamic synergies if you're labeling photos from home!
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What's surprising is that these jobs weren't outsourced to a country where someone would be glad to do it for $1 an hour because that beats anything else they could get.
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If you're worried about people fucking around on the clock, it's time to reevaluate your hiring scheme and whether or not you're suited to be a manager.
Good managers can see that in the output of their people. Bad managers can't even see it if their people goof off in the office.
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"Good managers can figure out if people are fooling around while on the clock" is probably not the proof of your first paragraph that you thought it was.
So that is the I in their AI? (Score:2)
You gotta break a few eggs (Score:4, Funny)
OpenAI valued at 30B? (Score:1)
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What is wrong with $15 an hour for this work? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't understand why everyone thinks they are entitled to $200 per hour pay. If you want that kind of pay you need to develop some unique skills. There are plenty of information about AI on the internet, go educate yourself and produce a groundbreaking model. You will be a billionaire in no time. Make a model that does what ChatGPT does but works on a consumer GPU or better yet Coral TPU. But this is some hard work. Much easier to post on Slashdot about how low the pay is.
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True, but then again, if we paid people by their economic worth, we'd see CEOs sucking dicks for a warm meal.
And have you seen the average CEO? They'd starve to death.
Thinking about it... I have to admit I fail to see the downside.
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So garbage collectors get high wages and management no wages.
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Everyone deserves a living wage. Full stop.
No. No they don't. Everyone deservers a wage proportional to the value they generate.
I absolutely do not deserve a living wage for writing poetry (but you may want to pay me a living wage for not inflicting poems on you).
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If value is defined as "whatever people are willing to pay", and people are willing to pay for poetry...
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The OP asserted the deservedness of a wage is proportional to its value. Per his argument, value is relevant.
Maybe you're talking to someone else, or you neglected to read the two sentences he posted?
Re:What is wrong with $15 an hour for this work? (Score:4, Insightful)
If a human devotes 1/3 of each weekday (or more) for an hourly or salaried position, they absolutely deserve enough income to live on. I don't care what the "value" of their labor is. If there are jobs that aren't "valued" enough for people to work full time at them and be able to at least scrape by, then those jobs aren't "valued" enough to exist, so they either need to go away, or businesses (and by extension) societies need to reevaluate their priorities, otherwise the system has failed us, and we're literally doomed.
In 2023, ~30k/year is enough for many people in the developed world to live a reasonably comfortable, but probably frugal life. It's not enough to support a family of five, without extreme frugality, but a single person can probably make it on that everywhere but the most expensive places, which includes pretty much every major city in the world now, so it *is* complicated, but at the core, it's really simple, if you dedicate your life to a job that takes up nearly half your waking hours, it should be possible to live on that: anything else is wage slavery.
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$15 USD an hour, 8 hours per day, 5 days per week, 52 weeks per year, that's $31,200 USD per year. That seems like a livable wage to me? Not a great wage, but you're not going to starve to death.
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Well that's assuming the gross is the same as the net, in America there are taxes like healthcare that eat into that, many jobs are not full time and people need at least a couple of weeks of holidays as well as statutory days off.
Then there is inflation, mostly hitting the stuff that is not optional, like food and housing. Every time I go grocery shopping, there is sticker shock, especially in the healthier foods like fruits and vegies. Gas is also predicted to be going back up.
A livable wage also should a
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Well that's assuming the gross is the same as the net, in America there are taxes like healthcare that eat into that, many jobs are not full time and people need at least a couple of weeks of holidays as well as statutory days off. Then there is inflation, mostly hitting the stuff that is not optional, like food and housing. Every time I go grocery shopping, there is sticker shock, especially in the healthier foods like fruits and vegies. Gas is also predicted to be going back up. A livable wage also should allow for some savings for emergencies like your car breaking down.
Sorry, but no. "Frugal but decent" does not in any way involve a car.
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Places that are cheap to live often do involve a car as areas with transit are desirable and expensive. And then here, there is a transit strike, going into its 8th week, so you need savings to pay for an Uber/taxi. Even if you bicycle to work, things can break or go missing.
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Define "livable". Is that enough to rent a room and feed yourself? A full time minimum wage job would do that so long as you live with other people. $15x40x50 is 30k a year. That even gives you two weeks off. You could actually rent a room with other people for about 1000 a month. So I guess minimum wage of $15 does mean livable.
If "livable" means comfortable, then you are talking about paying nearly $75k in San Diego. So you think a McDs worker deserves $75k a year? If any high school dropout could earn a
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Childless group living is a serious option for people making $30k/yr or even substantially less than that for groups larger than two, even in the most expensive places in the world, but I don't think that concept would rank high in economic policymaker circles.
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If a human devotes 1/3 of each weekday (or more) for an hourly or salaried position, they absolutely deserve enough income to live on. I don't care what the "value" of their labor is. If there are jobs that aren't "valued" enough for people to work full time at them and be able to at least scrape by, then those jobs aren't "valued" enough to exist, so they either need to go away
I have so many problems with that opinion.
First, you realize the implication of this is you think people are better off not working at all rather than working a low wage job? Really? You'd prefer McBurgers installed kiosks rather than hire high school students to take orders?
I don't think the total hours worked per week matter. Are you saying if the job is primarily worked by part-time workers it's OK to pay lower wages? Like, y'know, most minimum wage jobs?
Why do you get to say what job I'm willing to take
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Deserve's got nothing to do with it...
I don't like the term "deserve" here. "Earn" seems better: I do this task, I've earned this reward. "Earn" implies consequentiality, the one is a consequence of the other. I guess you could say "I do this task, I deserve this reward" but that just doesn't sound right. You'd never say that in real conversation.
The example which springs to mind is respect. "I deserve your respect." No, you need to earn my respect by doing something worthy of respect.
I should probably look up the definitions.
In the context o
Re: What is wrong with $15 an hour for this work? (Score:2)
Found the Vogon.
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Considering the 2008 finical crisis, NFTs, poaching agreements, beanie babies, etc,; exactly how do you determine "value"? How do you account for externalities in this "value"?
Want to do everyone is paid what their employer deems appropriate, fine.
But you better think of something better than the invisible hand or far worse things will come down the pike than minimum wage to smooth out transitions.
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...exactly how do you determine "value"? How do you account for externalities in this "value"?
The best way we have is a price system. Prices aren't just arbitrary values set by Uncle Moneybags. Remarkably enough, they roll up all the things you bring up into a single, simple to understand number. Prices work great in a zillion markets, so well you don't even think about them. Why would you think prices don't work in a labor market?
As you point out, prices aren't perfect. They're just much, much better than any alternative we know of.
Want to do everyone is paid what their employer deems appropriate, fine.
But you better think of something better than the invisible hand or far worse things will come down the pike than minimum wage to smooth out transitions.
To pick a nit, a price is where what a supplier (the employer) is w
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Are you saying that the right to life is contingent on the value one generates? Because I'm pretty sure that's what you're saying.
Goodness no, that's a strawman position and I suspect you know it.
I'm saying that employment is a simple commercial transaction, just like a million other ones.
There are innumerable things I need to survive: food, shelter, clothing, medicines, heat, protection from bandits and coyotes (seriously: we have packs of coyotes in my neighborhood and they could kill a person). We don't systematically force people to provide those things to me. If you want to have a society where everyone is guaranteed their surviv
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Soooo, you do not want society to function? I guess you have not thought that one through....
Re: What is wrong with $15 an hour for this work? (Score:3)
Let me rephrase parent.
Everyone deserves everything they need to live a dignified life. And on top of that they deserve a fair piece of the "value" they create.
Just because the poetry someone wrote on a bench in a park wrote can't immediately be sold you think that it doesn't have value?
What are you teaching your kids (who will later become CEOs, or interior designers, or Hollywood authors) when the topic "arts & culture" comes up? How to "design" a turkey ham sandwich?
Are you aware that many Picasso-gr
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Everyone deserves everything they need to live a dignified life. And on top of that they deserve a fair piece of the "value" they create.
Interesting philosophy. So, who do you think is obligated to provide that dignified life? And are there any obligations on the person receiving those benefits? That's a deep question and we're not going to resolve it here. Here's one question you might want to ponder: what did Robinson Crusoe deserve when he was shipwrecked? No doubt he deserved better than he had. Does that matter since there was no way for him to actually attain a dignified life?
Just because the poetry someone wrote on a bench in a park wrote can't immediately be sold you think that it doesn't have value?
Ah. Allow me to be clear. I wasn't talking about some generi
Re: What is wrong with $15 an hour for this work? (Score:2)
Interesting philosophy. So, who do you think is obligated to provide that dignified life?
Society at large.
And are there any obligations on the person receiving those benefits?
Nope.
(Apart from the general "being a member of society and not murdering anybody" kind of vibe, that is. But nothing along the lines of "...and shall be productive" lines I believe you're trying to aim at.)
That's a deep question and we're not going to resolve it here.
I feel like "we" have, although you're likely to disagree.
Here's one question you might want to ponder: what did Robinson Crusoe deserve when he was shipwrecked? No doubt he deserved better than he had. Does that matter since there was no way for him to actually attain a dignified life?
Here's another one for you: what does Robuson Crusoe's fate have to do with each and every one of ours, who isn't stranded, but has the rest of us around him, having productively contributed to a society of so much excess that the
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Interesting philosophy. So, who do you think is obligated to provide that dignified life?
Society at large.
But society at large doesn't actually provide food and clothing to anyone. Someone has to spend time and effort growing the food and weaving the cloth. Who is that someone? And not to put too fine a point on it, how much of my time and effort do you think I'm obligated to use to support you? That's the crux of the issue.
And are there any obligations on the person receiving those benefits?
Nope.
But that's unworkable. In the limiting case, why would anyone do anything to support themselves? Society will just cover everything. That's been the fatal flaw in every utopian commune ever:
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> The notion of a living wage is utterly stupid because the same amount of money that might be well below the poverty line in one place could be a princely sum in another.
Isn't that the definition of a basic living wage? The minimum wage it takes to not live in poverty, and said wage will vary depending on purchasing power, which itself varies depending on where one is living.
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Isn't $15 an hour (and up) the proposal in the US for a minimum wage that is also a living wage?
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It's below what it would be had wages kept pace with inflation.
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More than twice the actual minimum wage it seems.
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So what? As long as society functions, there is no problem at all with _some_ people doing the absolute minimum. You need to get your greed and envy unter control.
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So what? As long as society functions, there is no problem at all with _some_ people doing the absolute minimum. You need to get your greed and envy unter control.
No, *you* need to get your desire to live off other people under control.
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I disagree with your premises. Regardless, the people involved don't seem to be hired in America, and might, in fact, be payed a living wage where they are.
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Good! Then I expect you'll be in favor of a massive wealth redistribution?
No? You were just lying? Figures.
Fun fact: employees are necessarily paid well-below their productivity. Can you figure out why?
If a full-time job can't pay a living wage, that job shouldn't exist. If your business model depends on effective slavery, the problem is your business, not the employees demanding to be paid what they're worth.
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Good! Then I expect you'll be in favor of a massive wealth redistribution?
No? You were just lying? Figures.
Fun fact: employees are necessarily paid well-below their productivity. Can you figure out why?
If a full-time job can't pay a living wage, that job shouldn't exist. If your business model depends on effective slavery, the problem is your business, not the employees demanding to be paid what they're worth.
Fun fact: since we have (mostly) free market, *everyone* is being paid what their work is worth (to the one buying that work). And that's by definition. If you want to correct any discrepancy between that, work to make the market more free than it is today.
And if an employee thinks he's being paid below his worth, then he should either demand higher wage (and seek employment elsewhere if refused) - or reevaluate his own sense of worth, because apparently the market disagrees with it.
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*everyone* is being paid what their work is worth
False. You have some seriously mistaken ideas about how the free market works. I'm guessing you're a libertarian.
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*everyone* is being paid what their work is worth
False. You have some seriously mistaken ideas about how the free market works. I'm guessing you're a libertarian.
Oh, thank you for your convincing argument. "False" and an ad-personam. I totally stand corrected, convinced, and admit your victory in this discussion.
Slash fucking s in case you need it spelled out.
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That's way more than your non-argument deserved. I found out a long time ago that you can't reason with libertarians. They believe in magic.
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I think this is actually quite good income for the work that requires minimum skills. It is very repetitive work but it is not hard. Annotating data takes a lot of time but not like it requires some special skills.
I'd be most worried about "if you pay peanuts, you'll get monkeys." Sloppy classification could absolutely screw up an AI's training. At $15 an hour, I'm not going to be super motivated to be careful. I know when I earned $3.50 as a dishwasher, I didn't really care how clean the dishes were. Yes, that was back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
I wonder how companies deal with this? Personally, I'd have every image or text classified by at least three people, and I'd wonder if paying $30 an hour to only classi
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Back when $3.50 was minimum, of course he would of. Today? Not a chance.
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Well, yes. What happens is that insight, while better than a machine can do, will remain shallow. That will very strongly limit the usefulness of the model that comes out. But I guess the bean-counters have to fail a few times doing it on the cheap, before others step in and do it right.
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A sandwich cook might miscategorize certain training elements.
An Ivy League professor definitely would.
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I was actually thinking this wouldn't be a bad gig to do while I'm on the clock at my normal job...
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Until you see the pictures you have to classify. It is not buses and traffic lights.
Most people have mental problems after staring at child porn and extreme violence 8 hours a day.
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You do understand this work (looking at child porn, child violence, other violence) breaks peoples mental health.
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I don't understand why everyone thinks they are entitled to $200 per hour pay.
I think the concern is that $15 is already not a living wage in most places (really anywhere you would want to live) and that experience is coming to more places as investment firms buy up all the starter homes. They only own about 15% of all the homes AFAIK, but they have a much larger percentage of the homes that new buyers could normally actually afford. And they are driving up the prices systematically.
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In the South and Midwest, $15/hour for non-college work is pretty decent pay. And, with all due respect, these places really do have a couple of things going for them that might cause people to want to move there.
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And, with all due respect, these places really do have a couple of things going for them that might cause people to want to move there.
Sure, white male people.
A better idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Outsource the work to India for 1 bucks an hour and have people do what ChatGPT is allegedly doing. The answers wouldn't be any more hit-and-miss.
Doing it for free (Score:2)
Aren't we all doing it for free? Already today I've been forced through a half-dozen "click every square with a bicycle" captchas to log into various websites. That data goes to train image recognition AI.
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Sounds like these people are training on the negative stuff, click every illegal image is more like it.
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Inflation.
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chatGPT is the GPT model fine tuned with reinfocement. The reinforcement is provided by humans.
We want a raise! (Score:2)
Or else. Remember Tay [wikipedia.org]?
Isn't this Amazon's model? (Score:1)
V.C. is destroying A.I. (Score:1)
You still don't see the man behind the machine and they still keep selling you A.I. as the real thing.
It's even funnier when they tell you they don't even know how the algorithms do things they didn't anticipated... yeah... that's because you just pay a lousy $15/hour.
ChatGPT is not A.I. it's just A. Period.
Wonderful! (Score:2)
I can now ask ChatGPT for fries with my chat!
Cost of Living (Score:1)
Based on this cost of living calculator [bestplaces.net], $15 in KC, MO, is roughly equivalent to the following rates in techies cities:
Seattle, WA: ~$28
Redmond, WA: ~$33
San Francisco, CA: ~$42
San Jose, CA: ~$37