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Comment by pjscott | Hacker News Reader

> I’m judging the companies providing the “distasteful” options.

To restate my actual argument, since you haven't really responded to it: what work would you have very poor people do instead? There are other options, but are those options actually better? And how would you or I know?

It seems a little insulting to presume that you know their lives and their employment options better than they do, and should choose in their stead. But that's exactly what people are doing when they put public pressure on these companies to withdraw unseemly-looking options.

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I think a lot of people, many in the West with comfortable jobs, find it uncomfortable to admit that a lot of their lifestyle and maybe even their salary, depends somewhere down the supply chain on coercion (or at the very least, huge worker-employer power imbalances that look a lot like coercion) to make it all happen. We don't need to be able to rattle off a viable alternative, in order to express that there's something wrong.

I don't know if a job or product exists that, somewhere down the value chain totem pole, doesn't at some point rely on employers exploiting the threat of poverty to collect value from people.

Two things can be true at the same time.

In terms of employment, I would have anyone do the best they can to provide for their families. And it’s also a damn shame that the best option the people in question have is to label explicit content for AI for a dollar or two an hour at best.

I agree with you that providing an alternative should be part of the conversation and ultimate solution but providing an alternative is not a prerequisite to assert that something is unethical.

You talk about options like they have them. The main figure in the article said that they felt like it was digital servitude but a necessity. He’s not sitting down with a financial advisor to weigh his options and then deciding filtering smut for our AI overlords is a fiscally responsible decision.

To me, the issue is it's not enough to merely say "this job is unethical", unless your point is actually "the economic relationship between the first and third world is unethical". The first is true if the second is, but it's a small and weak part without the second explicitly stated to back it up.

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