Another piece reveals that OpenAI uses Kenyan workers with less than $2 / hour wage for toxicity identification, which seems to be more than the $0.5 / hour average of the capital, Nairobi.
Uh. That’s … not a very faithful summary. “Oh, we paid them more than market, though, so it’s okay” is not a reasonable takeaway here; their working conditions might have been better, but it’s reasonable to ask that people attempt to hit acceptability targets, rather than just improve pareto, and openai definitely did not hit working conditions acceptability targets. Many workers reported significant trauma.
Thank you for pointing this out! It seems I wasn’t informed enough about the context. I’ve dug a bit deeper and will update the text to:
Another piece reveals that OpenAI contracted Sama to use Kenyan workers with less than $2 / hour wage ($0.5 / hour average in Nairobi) for toxicity annotation for ChatGPT and undisclosed graphical models, with reports of employee trauma from the explicit and graphical annotation work, union breaking, and false hiring promises. A serious issue.
Uh. That’s … not a very faithful summary. “Oh, we paid them more than market, though, so it’s okay” is not a reasonable takeaway here; their working conditions might have been better, but it’s reasonable to ask that people attempt to hit acceptability targets, rather than just improve pareto, and openai definitely did not hit working conditions acceptability targets. Many workers reported significant trauma.
Thank you for pointing this out! It seems I wasn’t informed enough about the context. I’ve dug a bit deeper and will update the text to:
For some more context, here is the Facebook whistleblower case (and ongoing court proceedings in Kenya with Facebook and Sama) and an earlier MIT Sloan report that doesn’t find super strong positive effects (but is written as such, interestingly enough). We’re talking pay gaps from relocation bonuses, forced night shifts, false hiring promises, supposedly human trafficking as well? Beyond textual annotation, they also seemed to work on graphical annotation.