OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic

I was a student in the former Soviet Union in early 1990s when the old system collapsed, taking with it stipends that were sufficient for school cafeteria food. After that I occasionally worked for 30 cents per hour doing somewhat-synchronous translation for preachers who came from the US to convert the masses.

While the money sounded laughable (the US minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr) and some employers got borderline uncomfortably weird, working 4-5 evenings for a week allowed me to feed myself for a couple of months and focus on my studies. I never considered myself to be taken advantage of. Just my 2c.

Go to southern EU and you'll see numbers which are either very familiar or... actually lower.

Weird times. I wonder when will this growth in salaries stabilise?

This raises more of a modal/philosophical question for me which is: should we be outsourcing some of the most vile parts of social media? Is it fair to go to someone in a developing country and offer them a wage lightly above average in exchange for having to look at this content for hours? I have no answers to these questions myself but it's a question I ask when social media companies outsource the content moderation.

to me, it goes back to the argument about remote workers should be paid less than the in office worker. or workers living in cheaper areas should be paid less than those living in expensive areas. to me, the salary should be paying for the work being done and that's it. if the same level of work is being done by both employees, it shouldn't matter if one is in Kenya and the other is in the US. the value of the work is what should be getting compensated. again though, i'm no economist.

And then Kenya doesn't gain the benefit of the $2/hr wages (which, as mentioned, is already above average), plus the benefits in knowledge & experience, improved infrastructure, and secondary jobs, as well as the possibility of similar jobs in the future.

China started out competing almost exclusively on wages (like Japan, Korea, and Taiwan before them), and now the US and EU worry about Chinese advanced industries (eg. semiconductors) surpassing their own, the same way Taiwan did with chips and Japan did with cars.

Competing via low wages is, unfortunately, a necessary first step to growing an economy.

This is the average rate the government pays secondary school teachers in Ghana, after 2-3 years of experience. It's almost 2x the rate that private schools pay teachers.

With this wage, no allowances, a single person can live independently in an apartment, and eat out every single night of the week if they choose. It's a fine and decent wage for what amounts to work only requiring a good pair of eyes and basic literacy.

Employers don't pay $5 per hour because they wouldn't make a profit either.

We are payed what the company can get away with.

It’s about power, not value. Value is much less of a factor than people like to think.

Same goes for people who are payed a lot (like CEOs). Sure they have impact on the organization, but they also have power.

i suspect that when we look at what caused a raise in salaries at a certain place it is rarely companies from abroad paying more, but simply the local economy developing, causing people to ask for more (which often meant that international companies stopped hiring there, e.g. china).

That is what's happening in Cuba where highly skilled people with good English skills rather work in tourism than as doctors, engineers or teachers. Not a good long-term situation.

The more people go there looking to hire somebody, the quicker it gets pushed up. But salaries do basically never change suddenly anywhere, because it's the local people that pay most of them.

(And, no, this is not fair. And locals should push for higher pay.)

> The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance.

Which makes $2 a RELATIVELY better wage, however for the work - basically content filtering through the worst of the internet - there should be a higher compensation and psychological help available.

In this case, if Facebook and other online services had it available, they would have been better off reusing what they already developed for their side of content filtering. I want to believe 99% of bad content is already automatically filtered out, and anything that comes through and flagged by content moderators fed back into the systems that automate the process.

Of course, PPP doesn't constrain itself to subsistence food.

A Kenyan has told you that this job pays substantially better than average and that they wish more companies would make such jobs available, and your response is "no, you're wrong, this job pays too little". On what basis do you make that claim? What makes you better qualified than OP to comment on conditions in Kenya?

The point of the OP comment is that it's not "next to nothing". The cost of living differs from place to place and a small amount of USD can be worth a _lot_ in many developing nations.

Let’s imagine an alternative timeline where OpenAI pays $200/hr for this service.

At that price point is it still exploitive?

Is it ever appropriate or ethical to ask humans to voluntarily subject themselves to traumatic experiences in exchange for compensation?

I’m still processing my own thoughts on this topic so I’m curious to learn about other viewpoints.

The difficult part, where you'd get the most out of human labeling of data, is the grey area where the models diverge or are uncertain.

In this case is text. There’s no graphic depictions of anything. There could be foul, abusive, or racist language. But that’s much less difficult to deal with.

Its not exploitation if you're paying people higher than their local cost of living and higher than other local jobs. If you're just appalled about people being paid an amount of money that to YOU, based on your cost of living isn't fair because you'd want to make more, then be appalled at capitalism as a whole and how much work is being hired outside of company's originating countries. The production of almost everything globally is outsourced to locales where the cost to compete is lower than in the originating country.

I could pay a Kenyan $17 an hour, or I could pay a Kansan instead and get US government benefits. The same applies at every payment level. Your logic fails the moment you realize that not every person/worker on earth is equal.

Insisting on this sort of articles just goes to show how sheltered these offended people are. I live in the third world and I know people who are thankful to Coca Cola for their "$2 wages."

To remain stable, economic growth must be slow and steady. The alternative is you simply don't go to Kenya, rather, you go somewhere else, and Kenyans get $0/hour.

This is a bad take. Globalization (what you call "taking advantage") raised a billion people out of abject poverty in the last few decades.

When a company pays more than the prevailing wage, they're doing good and deserve kudos. Expecting economic deals with less developed countries to be driven by charity (which is what you're advocating for) rather than mutual benefit is A) paternalistic and demeaning, and B) cannot possibly be the basis of sustainable economic gains for developing countries.

(And I think most of what you wrote is based on similar stereotypes)

Doesn't it? If you have some kind of objective measure of fairness, I would like to hear it.

that's a very good question, but asking it as if it is a problem of OpenAI and not a problem of literally all of our economy sounds a little strange to me.

That is just economic nonsense. Labor productivity of economy depends on utilization of capital and ideas in that economy and it is pretty hard to increase. Average wage per hour in that economy cannot be higher than average productivity per hour. If you set minimal wage higher than its productivity, then you just destroyed almost all legal employment and forced everyone to grey economy or subsistence agriculture.

by using the same argument, you can claim that someone taking home $300k USD a year living in CA is a victim of modern slavery simply just because his/her employer can afford more.

Kenya is a multilingual country. Swahili, a Bantu language, and English are widely spoken as lingua francas and serve as the two official languages. English was inherited from colonial rule (see British Kenya).

https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Languages_of_Kenya

Hate this argument. As a for-profit company, OpenAI is legally and ethically obligated to minimize unnecessary expenses. It's purpose is to develop AI systems, not to provide people with high-paying jobs.

Also, I'm not up on the laws regarding this stuff, but are the other, awful categories illegal to collect? If not, there's not much room for ambiguity.

For those looking for an AI data labeling service also tries to help workers along the way, here's a plug to the company I started "dataprep.be" [4]

We have a small preference for working workers with special needs (deaf, mute and employees with small handicaps). Public subsidies for these type of workers help our case in the EU as well as contraints for some public institutions in the EU to hire more handicap workers.

With clients more sensitive to costs, we also work with remote data labelers from developing countries. We help putting checks in place to limit forced and child labor. We pay 5% extra so they have time to learn high demand tech skills. (Using Khan Academy and free access to a normally 250$/year Datacamp subscription)

Happy to work with the HN crowd or just receive feedback and mentoring! (My email is in my profile)

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/88apnv/underpaid-workers-are... [2] https://gizmodo.com/horror-stories-from-inside-amazons-mecha... [3] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2022-10-20/beh... [4] https://www.dataprep.be

Where did you earn your law degree?

2. It says OpenAI "used" workers which has a negative connotation.

3. It is factually incorrect: OpenAI paid a vendor $12.50 per hour. It's unclear if they knew how much the actual workers were paid.

4. It used a negative framing implying ChatGPT is toxic.

So something like

"OpenAI vendor paid Kenyan workers above median wage to make ChatGPT more safe"

"Kenyan workers helped make OpenAI's ChatGPT less toxic"

"OpenAI paid Kenyan workers minimum wage to work on ChatGPT"

Many different things are objectively true, but of course they mention the pay, because they know that to most of their "Western" readers it sounds outrageous.

If someone agrees with your premise that "these days the human cost is just another cost", then it seems logical that a newspaper editor/author will shape the headline about economic suffering, instead of mental suffering.

By adding more information to the headline about "$2 per hour", it might make the discussion more confusing by much of the comments discussing the economic part. BUT, a clickbait-y title might increase the reach of the article.

In return he increases income taxes, devalues the money and sets up the country for exporting luxury goods that are needed for 1st world countries (but local people would have no chance of buying) why destroying their own agriculture, so that they have to import inferior mass manufactured products from rich countries. On the long term the countries have to give back 10-20 times the original loan that is gone in a few years.

Does any of this sound familiar to you?

Alex Gladstein is writing a new book about this huge problem, as the latest good books about it he found were in the 70s.

That makes it vulnerable to disruption.

From the article:

"That month, Sama began pilot work for a separate project for OpenAI: collecting sexual and violent images—some of them illegal under U.S. law—to deliver to OpenAI."

A bay area worker may view this as exploitation, while I say "please god may this never end"

OpenAI went shopping for Kenyan labor and those who did the job were not American and never interviewed in SF

Salary is a result of market.

Same arguments were used for slave labor. How are they going to take care of themselves? Might as well just keep them as slaves. What are we going to do, pay them?

Child labor has been used by just about every major fashion brand in the world, not just to "make bricks for their village"... If that's the extent of what you think child labor is, might want to check out some books or do some googling. Here's just one to get you started: [2].

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2011/08/17/zara... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nike_sweatshops

Are all the sweatshop and slave labor[1] jobs created by Zara good for those children and slaves? You get cheap clothes out of it after all. But is it really helping anyone other than Zara, and their CEO who is worth ..checks notes... 50+ billion dollars?

Companies could help a lot more by increasing labor standards, helping those in need, paying above a living day to day wage, etc. The would still have a few billion left in the bank I believe...

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/andersonantunes/2011/08/17/zara...

For simple outsourcing tasks like this one, outsourcing to Kenya is a win-win. You can drastically reduce costs, while significantly improving people's lives.

That'd be true regardless of labor laws, unions, or otherwise. The legal system in Kenya isn't quiet as wonderful for business as you describe; it inherits British colonial bureaucracy, has some corruption, isn't all that laissez-faire, and can be a minor pain in the butt. Unions, likewise, would increase income, but not by enough to make this a bad deal.

Kenya is competing with India and the Philippians here, not with low-cost US labor.

They're being specifically exploited because that is what the company set out to do. You could argue any number of benefits as a smokescreen but the reality is that they hired people in Kenya because they knew they could exploit them. Everything else is post-hoc rationalization.

Just like all the useless moral posturing on here (you know, as long as there is no personal cost involved beyond expressing an opinion).

Kindly point where I wrote that.

Are there rules and regulations preventing access to the official forex markets?

One can try to build an alternative company with all those extra employee benefits you laid out but it still has to deal with the economic reality of clients like OpenAI not willing to pay more.

If gp's hypothetical Nigeria outsourcing company costs +3x or more to label training data than Sama Kenya (https://www.sama.com/) -- because they have to fund those extra benefits, then game theory economics predicts that OpenAI would choose the less expensive Sama Kenya.

This means the hypothetical Nigeria company doesn't have revenue to fund those extra wages and benefits.

Just because a company has an alternative (and more expensive) idea to compensate employees, it doesn't mean customers will pay more for it.

Absolutely not. There's no reason to accept sweatshops just because workers are being paid to be exploited. There's no reason at all that workers in those places couldn't be paid just as well (if not better really) without all of the other issues commonly found in sweatshops like horrific and dangerous working conditions, child labor, sexual abuse, and human rights violations.

There's no giving corporations a pass on their use of sweatshops just because they're giving the desperate people they exploit a little more than they could get themselves. That's not "trending in the right way" it's just greed and exploitation.

For example, a person who is starving to death will be extremely grateful when someone gives them even rotten and moldy food. They'll accept the food even if the person offering it makes them first perform horrible immoral acts to get it, but that doesn't make it right and the person forcing starving people to do terrible things for spoiled scraps is still an asshole even if it fills that person's stomach for the night

Thinking you can have both higher wages and jobs in unstable countries is either advocating for state-mandated outsourcing or is wishful thinking.

Your statement is problematic, because (a) clearly at some point "less bad" stops being what anyone defines as exploitation, and (b) if you're not living in the tradeoff space, you're not qualified to judge where that crossover is.

There certainly is exploitation to be found*, but paying a multiple of all other opportunities, even if that multiple is below what is available in a different context, is not exploitation.

It's putting a thumb on the scale, accelerating the tilt towards equity.

* There are articles about labeling or screening done by workers in USA that are as PTSD-inducing as the linked stories, where people were paid US wage and had to quit. Don't confuse the job with the pay, these are two different issues.

// Disclosure: I grew up in central Africa. In my teens I worked in the local tech economy, not the expat economy.

Fact: a lot of jobs (in Kenya, at least) from corporations and international NGOs, come with a deadline to submit your application - yet, the job isn't posted anywhere until 1-2 weeks before the deadline, AND then only on the company's website!

Kenya has private job posting sites that obviously crawl the company's pages for listing updates; and this helps to at least get the jobs publicized. But none of these sites have the sophisticated scraping systems like i.e. Indeed.com

For "social enterprises" work, it's all made worse because of the bad press and lawsuits that Sama/Samasource -YET AGAIN- and similar companies have been getting into within the last year, re: https://www.wired.com/story/social-enterprise-technology-afr...

These Companies have now stopped (i.e. hidden, temporarily) their listings for "content moderators" and "image labelers".

I guess the only way Kenyans are going to find about these jobs are through some connection with current employees; informal sources like Whatsapp groups; or Sama's recruiters sourcing exclusively within the country, so as to not put more international spotlight on their company.

Is for google the phrase site:ke data entry or maybe a more targeted search

Or maybe find local job sites?, to hire (virtual assistant) workers directly to cut out freelancer site commission ( but with increased risk .... etc )

Companies are 100% exploiting cheaper labor in other countries - they are only interested in the bottom line.

opportunity and exploitation are not mutuality exclusive, nor does one person's opportunity erase another's exploitation.

Creating opportunity is great: do that without exploiting people - that isn't a requirement. Praise opportunity given. Denounce exploitations not to remove opportunities - but to improve them.

Besides, the government doesn't guarantee every Kenyan $122 a month so the real heroes are those who actually pay that money out-of-pocket.

The government can mandate a "fair" wage, but the government never employs everyone at that rate. These "exploiters" are actually giving Africans money for their labor - I think I'm more on the side of those who pay money for an African's labor vs. those that stand on the sidelines and try to determine what is fair.

How much do you think wages are in Nigeria to the US? A quick googling gives approximately 3 cents to the dollar. That's a 33x difference. You would rather not improve the wages of someone making $0.03 / dollar. Because it _might_ hurt someone making $0.82 / dollar. Yeah equal pay for equal work is about protecting the relatively high US wages. And I don't think it's at all clear that exporting these jobs specifically hurts women workers and not male workers.

> Sure, you got your quadruple pay, while some woman here went without money for medicine and died before her time.

The average life expectancy in Nigeria is TWENTY FIVE years lower than in the US. Quadrupling the pay of someone in Nigeria has a far greater impact to their health than it does to someone in a first world country where there is significantly more access to medicine and other resources. If you are trying to help someone, wouldn't you want to focus on the population that is dying 25 years before everyone else?

> Now the (actual or philosophical) descendants of those Europeans play off the impoverished Nigerians against the local Women to exploit both groups.

How are Nigerians being exploited here? If it had been a local Nigerian company offering them a wage of $2 an hour (which is over their minimum wage) would it be exploitation? Or is it simply because the company operates multi-nationally does it become exploitative.

> Equal pay for equal work is not a hard concept to understand - it is basic fairness.

What is your proposed change here? The minimum wage where I am is $18.50 an hour. Therefore under equal-pay-for-equal-work, if a company based where I am living wants to offer a job outside my area must pay $18.50? Which means, the jobs would never get exported to Nigeria. Sure that is a win for people living in the US, but not for the people living in deep poverty on the other side of the world.

Well, that's exactly the point.

The hypocrisy is to pretend it is concern about exploiting poor people while actually it's about protecting own high wages.

-+-+-+

Equal pay for equal work is not a hard concept to understand - it is basic fairness. Deriding advocates of this as "SJW in SF or NY" or "self-anointed do-gooders" indicates a lack of empathy, lack of thought around the broader implications, or in the worst case, capitalistic psychopathy.

Sure, you were able to "pull yourself up by your bootstraps". On the other side of the equation, the company paying you a pittance used your capitulation to drive down wages elsewhere, including in its home country. There's a reason why maybe women as a group in this day and age continue to earn only 82 cents on the $ that men make [1]. It is easy for a company to play off the "Nigerian" group of workers willing to accept a pittance against the "Women" group of workers living in a High COL area. Sure, you got your quadruple pay, while some woman here went without money for medicine and died before her time.

Nigerian Low COL today can be attributed to colonialism - European colonialists extracted the multi-generational wealth in that region and left it impoverished within a short period of time, and it takes time to build that wealth back (real rate of return is typically 2-3%) so everything costs less because that's all the people living there can afford to pay for local consumables and durables like, well, food, or housing.

Now the (actual or philosophical) descendants of those European colonialists and colonial companies play off the impoverished Nigerians against the local Women to exploit both groups.

So instead of fighting to correct the structural injustices of either colonialism or labor exploitation, the English-speaking Nigerians 'pulling themselves up by their bootstraps' lobby for the continued abrogation of equal-pay-for-equal-work and deride the people advocating for structural justice in the form of equal-pay-for-equal-work as "social justice warriors in SF or NY" or "self-anointed do-gooders". Bravo!

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/01/gender-pay-ga...

So you want every corporation to have a law enforcement or investigative journalism arm? How would that work exactly?

What rights, specifically, should they be enforcing? European rights? American rights? Australian rights? The UN's human rights?

And thus wouldn't pay Kenyans to do this labor. Not sure that makes any Kenyans better off.

We've seen this experiment in China - in one generation, hundreds of millions of Chinese have made the leap from farm labor to the iPhone-owning middle class.

I think companies can choose to pay better, but even if they choose to be "evil, greedy capitalists" it still beats the majority of local alternatives.

Humanity has improved thanks to our desire to go beyond the worst aspects of our nature instead of embracing it at every chance.