How They
Make the Sausage on the
AI Plantation
AI Instruction writers hire taskers
Inside the AI Factory: the humans that make tech seem human
behind even the most impressive AI system are people — huge numbers of people labeling data to train it and clarifying data when it gets confused. O
Information shaping AI behavior, is done by people doing the shaping. Instruction writers must come up with rules that will get humans to categorize the world with perfect consistency. To do so, they often create categories no human would use.
AI is very good at specific tasks, Duhaime said, and that leads work to be broken up and distributed across a system of specialized algorithms and to equally specialized humans. An AI system might be capable of spotting cancer, he said, giving a hypothetical example, but only in a certain type of imagery from a certain type of machine; so now, you need a human to check that the AI is being fed the right type of data and maybe another human who checks its work before passing it to another AI that writes a report, which goes to another human, and so on. “AI doesn’t replace work,” he said. “But it does change how work is organized.”
https://www.remotasks.com/ annotators generally earn between $10 and $25 per hour. Kenyan annotators I spoke with had dropped to between $1 and $3 per hour. That is, when they were making any money at all.
Sparrow, one of the many bots competing with ChatGPT. Her job is to talk with it all day, “human-feedback data.” At about $14 an hour, plus bonuses for high productivity.
But if you want to train a model to do legal research, you need someone with training in law, and this gets expensive. Experts get $50.00 or more. You can make $45 an hour teaching robots law or make $25 an hour teaching them poetry Scale.com DeepMind, which is a subsidiary of Google, said the annotators working on Sparrow are paid “at least the hourly living wage” based on their location.
Taskup.ai, DataAnnotation.tech, Gethybrid.io all appear to be owned by the same company: Surge AI. Surge’s customers include OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Anthropic.
Taskers are the labor on the AI Plantation
Meredith Whittaker is a scholar and long-time tech worker whose work examines the political economy and social implications of computational technology and the industry that controls it.
https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/origin-stories-plantations-computers-and-industrial-control/
Charles Babbage & his 19th c. blueprints for digital computation to industrial labor control & the creation of a regime of denigrated, disciplined “free” labor. All of which has its roots in plantation slavery.
Human-in-the-Loop AI model
HITL-enabled AI systems
A 2018 Stanford study found that a Human-in-the-Loop AI model works better than AI on its own or human doctors on their own. These systems can help improve accuracy while maintaining human-level standards of work. This can apply to many industries and change the way people work all across the world!
What is Reinforcement Learning From Human Feedback (RLHF)
RLHF develops advanced language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4