India's female workers watching hours of abusive content to train AI

I’ve noticed that the type of people to have problems with these kind of jobs - people who think this is some type of neocolonialism - can not appreciate the difference between real material poverty and metaphysical problems with watching some abusive content.

This person is earning a really competitive wage. She’s getting the power and independence to lead a materially good life. This will trump every other metaphysical concern you can have by watching these abusive videos.

Some one has to moderate these videos and it’s great that it’s someone poor who’s getting the opportunity.

I remember watching this kind of content for free on Liveleak back in the day.

Maybe they should get edgy teenagers to do the content classification rather than third-world rural women with minimal media exposure.

It's a well compensated job vs local opportunities but feels like it should be an extravagantly compensated job vs local opportunities. Someone has to do it, but also somewhere along the continuum of doing factory garment work for $100 and deep sea welding for $100k, it feels like this should be closer to latter.

Seems like kind of job that needs physical filtering. Onboard bunch of candidates, measure their vitals, find low responders to abusive stimulus, hire them. I'm sure there's some poorly replicated psych study done on 1st years to draw from.

How do humans with very little exposure to grotesque violence or extreme content universally label such content so well? This is not graduate level data that needs labeling.

What is missing in an AI model for it to intuitively understand what content is extreme from very few labeled sample in training?

This is an absolutely horrific thing to make a person do. I see comments that say "well someone needs to do it." Then why not volunteer?

When VCs and investors keep saying 'There will be new jobs', they never tell you exactly what they are - on purpose.

Now we know that it is actually being a data labeller, AI tutor and content moderator, but in very low wage countries such as in India.

This is the post-AGI reality. 'Abundance', but not for you.

> Murmu, 26, is a content moderator for a global technology company, logging on from her village in India’s Jharkhand state

> With just four months left on her contract, which pays about £260 a month

Earning US$350/mo working remotely in a village in one of the poorest states in India is an extremely competitive given that the alternative would be spending 12 hours sewing fast fashion for Zara earning US$130-150/mo [0], doing bit piece ag labor for around US$100/mo and participating in MGNREGA for US$50/mo, become a housewife, or become a Naxalite/Maoist insurgent to earn a couple thousand dollars when surrendering [1].

Content moderation means interacting with extremely depressing and horrid content, but someone needs to do it, and once models get good enough we would start seeing articles about how "all the good 100% remote first jobs with no barrier to entry" are being automated to oblivion.

Yes it sucks, but the alternative is becoming a migrant worker or working in light manufacturing where QoL is worse. Heck, we used to see similar articles about Chinese workers for Apple barely 14 years ago in then equally poor Sichuan [2], but you don't see those kinds of articles anymore.

Development takes time and the fact that US$350/mo remote data annotation and content moderation jobs are now penetrating into villages in what used to be the Naxalite/Maoist/Red Corridor where bombings and gun battles were a part of normal life just 10 years ago [3] is a massive step up developmentally - it means that there is robust enough internet, literacy, banking, and public services penetration for the seeds for a services economy to form.

Edit: Thanks for the downvotes westerners - my family is from these kinds of villages in India and Vietnam. The alternatives are extremely bleak - especially for a tribal woman like Ms Murmu at the bottom of the social and patriarchal hierarchy.

[0] - https://theprint.in/ground-reports/industries-finally-return...

[1] - https://www.thehansindia.com/news/national/18-yr-old-maoist-...

[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/business/ieconomy-apples-...

[3] - https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2016/Nov/23/six-maoi...

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