Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

May 7 (Xinhua)-- OpenAI's chat robot ChatGPT has achieved great success by outsourcing the training of workers. The workers tagged the training data, talked to the robot back and forth and corrected the answers generated by the system. These American outsourced workers earn more than $15 an hour, both for survival and for a head start on the development of artificial intelligence.

The following is the translation:

Alexej Savreux, 34, who lives in Kansas City, Missouri, says he has done a variety of jobs over the years: selling fast food sandwiches, working as a caretaker, moving garbage and installing stereos for theaters. Now that he is an artificial intelligence trainer, he no longer needs to do manual work.

As one of the many outsourced troops in the artificial intelligence industry, Saffler and others have been training artificial intelligence systems behind the scenes how to analyze data so that artificial intelligence can eventually generate all kinds of text and images that amaze users. To improve the accuracy of artificial intelligence, Safler tags various photos and predicts what text the app should generate next.

Although they earn more than $15 an hour, they don't have any benefits.

Over the past few years, Saffler and other outsourced workers have spent a lot of time training OpenAI's artificial intelligence system to make ChatGPT more responsive to users. These workers provide the text, tags and other information needed by artificial intelligence companies such as OpenAI, meeting their endless urgent needs.

In November last year, OpenAI released the artificial intelligence chat robot ChatGPT, which caused a craze in the field of generative artificial intelligence. "We all do coolie work, but without us, there would be no artificial intelligence language system," Saffler said. "

"you can design all the neural networks you want, you can involve all the researchers you want, but if you don't have tags, you don't have ChatGPT," Saffler said. "you have nothing."

The job will not bring much fame or wealth to Saffler, but it is an important job that is easily overlooked in the field of artificial intelligence, and the work of outsourced workers may be overshadowed by the magic of the frontiers of new technology.

The San Francisco-based artificial Intelligence Partnership (Partnership on AI) is dedicated to promoting research and education in artificial intelligence. "A lot of people are celebrating the achievements of artificial intelligence, but we have overlooked an important part that artificial intelligence is still very dependent on a lot of people," said Sonam Jindal, the group's director of artificial intelligence, labour and economic programs.

For years, the technology industry has relied on thousands of low-skilled, low-income workers to support its vast computer business, from punch card operators in the 1950s to Google contractors who recently complained that they were second-class citizens at the company. With the rise of various outsourcing platforms, many online odd jobs have become more popular.

Today, a similar story is taking place in the booming artificial intelligence industry.

This kind of outsourced work is often unstable and can change at any time and place due to changes in demand. Employees engaged in such work either sign written contracts directly with the company or are employed by third-party suppliers that specialize in temporary or outsourced business. They have little or no access to benefits such as health insurance, which means lower labor costs for technology companies. In addition, these jobs are often anonymous, and all the credit is given to executives and researchers at technology companies.

In a report in 2021, the artificial Intelligence Partnership warned of a surge in demand to improve the "data expansion effort" (data enrichment) of existing data sets by adding, updating, cleaning and processing data from external data sources. The group recommends that the artificial intelligence industry be committed to promoting fair pay and other improved practices. Last year, they issued guidelines that companies voluntarily follow.

So far, DeepMind, an artificial intelligence company owned by Google, is the only technology company that has publicly pledged to abide by these guidelines.

"A lot of people have realised that this is important," says Mr Jindahl. "the challenge now is to get the company to really put it into practice."

"this is a new job created by artificial intelligence," she added. "We have the potential to make this job a high-quality job, and practitioners are respected and valued for their contributions to technological progress."

Recently, job demand has surged, and some workers engaged in artificial intelligence outsourcing have begun to demand higher pay. Last Monday, more than 150 workers working in artificial intelligence in Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT in Nairobi, Kenya, were reported to have unionized on the grounds that they thought their wages were low and that their work caused some mental harm. Facebook and TikTok didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. OpenAI declined to comment.

So far, employees engaged in artificial intelligence outsourcing in the United States have not done anything like this, and they are still quietly contributing to the development of artificial intelligence systems word for word.

Saffler entered the industry through online job ads and now works from home on a laptop. Safler believes that this odd job in artificial intelligence has helped him get rid of homelessness. after all, the wage of $15 an hour is higher than the minimum wage in Kansas City. While some people may think that the necessary strenuous work is negligible, Safler believes that it is an essential entry-level job in the field of machine learning.

Job postings for outsourced artificial intelligence reflect both the surge in demand in the industry and the exhaustion of the job at times. Invisible Technologies, a temp agency, said in a job advertisement that it was looking for a "senior artificial intelligence data trainer", an entry-level job with a starting salary of $15 an hour, but could also be "beneficial". The job advertisement reads: "you can think of this job as a language art teacher, or as the most influential private technology teacher." Invisible Technologies said the new employees would work "under agreements developed by the world's leading artificial intelligence researchers", but did not disclose the names of the customers they served.

Although there are no exact data on how many outsourced workers are working for artificial intelligence companies, this form of work is becoming more and more common around the world. It was reported in January that OpenAI hired low-paid workers from Kenya to mark text containing a variety of undesirable content to help apps better identify.

In addition, it was reported earlier this year that OpenAI has hired about 1000 remote outsourced workers in places such as Eastern Europe and Latin America to tag data or train company software. Although Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said on Twitter that OpenAI was still a small company with about 375employees as of January, that figure did not include outsourced workers and did not fully reflect the size of the company's operations. A spokesman for OpenAI said no one could answer questions about outsourcing workers using artificial intelligence.

The job of creating data to train artificial intelligence models is not always simple and sometimes complex, but it is enough to attract those who want to start a business in the artificial intelligence industry.

Jatin Kumar, a 22-year-old computer science graduate from Austin, Texas, has been working in artificial intelligence for a year. He says this has made him aware of the latest development direction of generative artificial intelligence technology. "it gives you the opportunity to start thinking about how to use the technology before the public has access to it," Kumar said. " In addition, he founded a technology start-up called Bonsai, which develops billing software for hospitals.

As an artificial intelligence conversation trainer, Kumar's main job is to talk to chatbots and ask questions, which is part of the long process of training artificial intelligence systems. It was simple at first, he said, but as experience gained, the tasks became more and more complex. "every 30 to 45 minutes, you get a new task and ask new questions," Mr. Kumar said. The initial hint may be simple, such as "what's the capital of France?"

Kumar says he works with about 100 other outsourced workers to generate training data, correct answers, and fine-tune the model by giving feedback on the answers.

Kumar said other staff would deal with "tagged" conversations. Some users will feed back the answers of the chatbot to the company for review, and the staff will read the conversations submitted by ChatGPT users. When a marked conversation appears, the staff classifies it according to the type of error involved and then uses it to further train the artificial intelligence model.

"at first, it was a way for me to help solve problems and learn existing technologies at OpenAI," Kumar said. " But he says he can't imagine leaving the post now.

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