ChatGPT’s secret trainer army

3 years ago 1

ARTICLE AD BOX

OpenAI and other tech companies use numerous contract workers to help train artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT.

An NBC News report recently highlighted the often-overlooked contribution of these workers.

The media house spoke to one such worker — 34-year-old Kansas resident Alexej Savreaux — who has worked as an AI trainer for multiple startups, including OpenAI.

Savreaux is among many that help fine-tune AI systems by teaching them how to analyse data and respond with the appropriate text and images.

He previously worked in several so-called “low-skill” jobs, including as a fast food cook, custodian, and junk hauler.

As an AI trainer, his primary task is giving feedback to ChatGPT, including sentences, labels, and other information, for the AI language model to learn.

“We are grunt workers, but there would be no AI language systems without it,” said Savreux.

“You can design all the neural networks you want, you can get all the researchers involved you want, but without labellers, you have no ChatGPT. You have nothing.”

Savreaux got paid $15 (R276) an hour for his work on ChatGPT.

According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, the country’s average hourly wage in March 2023 was more than double that — at $33.20 (R610).

A Time investigation previously found that OpenAI had paid Kenyan contract workers $2 (R37) per hour to help teach ChatGPT to be less toxic.

However, that is more than Kenya’s average hourly income of $1.25.

Partnership on AI programme lead for AI, labour, and the economy, Sonam Jindal, told NBC News that labelling and training could be a high-quality job created by AI.

Her organisation previously warned there would be a surge in demand for the type of “data enrichment” work involved in AI training.

It published guidelines for fair compensation and improved labour practices in the industry.

To date, only Google’s AI subsidiary DeepMind has publicly committed to these guidelines.