The AI revolution is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour

Students who cheat with ChatGPT can look forward to these $15/hr jobs training the AI that they relied upon to get them their degrees. The students who actually did the work themselves should be much be better prepared to demonstrate how their work differs from the mediocre stream of bot-produced content.

Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze data so they can generate the kinds of text and images that have wowed the people using newly popular products like ChatGPT. To improve the accuracy of AI, he has labeled photos and made predictions about what text the apps should generate next.

The pay: $15 an hour and up, with no benefits.

Out of the limelight, Savreux and other contractors have spent countless hours in the past few years teaching OpenAI’s systems to give better responses in ChatGPT. Their feedback fills an urgent and endless need for the company and its AI competitors: providing streams of sentences, labels and other information that serve as training data.

“We are grunt workers, but there would be no AI language systems without it,” said Savreux, who’s done work for tech startups including OpenAI, the San Francisco company that released ChatGPT in November and set off a wave of hype around generative AI.

“You can design all the neural networks you want, you can get all the researchers involved you want, but without labelers, you have no ChatGPT. You have nothing,” Savreux said.

It’s not a job that will give Savreux fame or riches, but it’s an essential and often overlooked one in the field of AI, where the seeming magic of a new technological frontier can overshadow the labor of contract workers.  —NBC News

One thought on “The AI revolution is powered by these contractors making $15 an hour

  1. This article shines a crucial light on the often-undervalued work of AI labelers, who play a critical role in the development and refinement of sophisticated AI systems like ChatGPT. Savreux’s statement that “without labelers, you have nothing” underscores the importance of their work in the AI ecosystem.

    While the pay may not reflect the complexity and value of their contributions, it’s essential to recognize the skills and knowledge these contractors bring to the table. Their work helps to improve AI capabilities, making these systems more accurate, effective, and useful for a wide range of applications.

    It’s also noteworthy to consider the ethical and socio-economic aspects of this situation. The disparity between the high value of AI technology and the relatively low wages of the workers who contribute to its development raises questions about fair compensation and worker rights in the tech industry.

    It’s interesting to think about the impact of AI on education, as highlighted in the beginning of the article. While cheating with AI may provide short-term benefits for students, it doesn’t prepare them for the real-world challenges and complexities they’ll face in their careers. Authentic learning and skill development remain crucial, regardless of technological advancements.

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