Kenyan data workers risk their mental health to train AI
An invisible workforce is powering the artificial intelligence revolution. It is mostly based in the Global South and paid only a fraction of its Western counterparts. In Kenya, the job is leaving data workers traumatized and distressed.
Wow, thatâs horrific.
Too bad âsweat shopsâ have fallen off the list of fashionable activism targets. This form of exploitation seems even worse.
Weâve been hired [and paid pennies] to make billionaires rich.
The fate of all of us, if tech bros get their world-shaping way.
Seems like a stunt or at best a technology demonstration rather than a viable product. Also, the length of the communication bursts seem about as long as voice communication would have been. As someone in the YouTube comments said: congratulations, you have reinvented the dial up modem
This is fine. Who needs to spend time testing or even understanding critical software for things like air traffic control or self-driving vehicles when you can just âsay stuffâ and it âmostly worksâ? What a wonderful new future weâre all racing towardsâŠ
It will be interesting to see how highly-paid programmers react when they start getting replaced en mass with people who have absolutely no idea how to program or read code though.
This is a comment on a paper Schmidt wrote together with Dan Hendrycks, director of the Center for AI Safety, and Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI.
The paper is linked, but I havenât read it myself yet. So I canât really comment on the comment other than itâs an interesting read.
Ten thousand curses upon the bullshit machine industry and bullshit machine promoters!
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/06/state-department-ai-revoke-foreign-student-visas-hamas
You just know that this will not keep out actual terrorist sympathisers, but the French student who wrote âI think Palestinians have a right to liveâ in an online argument once, or the Georgian student who went to a protest against their own government once and stood next to someone with a Palestinian flag on their backpack, or the Kenyan student who has a name that sounds vaguely similar to Hamas.
Thus has security theatre ever been, long before it ever had that name.
More like DuckDuckGone, amirite?