The power of ChatGPT is harnessed by contract workers who receive a starting wage of $15 an hour, but receive no benefits as part of their job. Savreux, a member of this hidden army, is responsible for labeling images and training AI models to analyze data and generate compelling text and images. These contractors, who work tirelessly for OpenAI and other competitors, are essential to AI language systems, as without their input there would be no such systems.
OpenAI and similar organizations have the potential to recognize and value the contractors’ contributions, thus transforming their contracts into fulfilling and high-quality, high-paid jobs with benefits. This recognition is echoed by Sonam Jindal of the San Francisco-based non-profit The Partnership on AI, which works to promote artificial intelligence research and education. The Partnership recently issued voluntary guidelines and detailed a surge in demand for data enrichment work. There is even momentum for the formation of a union of Kenyan contract workers employed by Facebook, TikTok, and ChatGPT, the goal being higher wages and better job security.
OpenAI, a research laboratory in San Francisco, is one of the most influential players in the artificial intelligence industry. Founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and backed by the likes of Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Microsoft, OpenAI focuses on building genuine general intelligence, with possible applications in the fields of robotics, security, and computer vision. They specialize in researching deep learning and natural language processing, with the goal of producing safer and more capable artificial intelligence systems. The work of the contractors, who give feedback on OpenAI’s systems in order to train them to produce more natural language sentences, labels, and other training data, are essential for this. Meanwhile, these contractors receive minimal pay for their work, often as little as $15 an hour, with no access to benefits or job security.
