The article states three reasons for doing so, but all of them are very cringe baity words.
Low paid workers are due to local economy government doing jack to improve their wages in the first place. In China, competition is high, thus low pay (with other reasons such as real estate crashes, etc)
Visualization makes sense but does not mean it's colonialism as colonialism requires forced intervention, and there is no such play here.
Cool project bad political motivated wordings in the post.
> People don't even know about their fellow co-workers.
This is very important. To isolate workers to make them powerless gives even more power to companies that are already very powerful.
It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments.
This is interesting to me because my experience with larger companies has been the opposite: The companies were always trying to get coworkers together and have events (on company time) that got teams mixing and socializing across departments. Remote workers were pressured to come on-site. Return to office attempts were used to bring isolated workers closers to their peers.
It was always employees who resisted it the most. Most wanted to stay in their lane and limit their social circles to a few coworkers they liked.
> It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments
I can't actually tell what you're talking about or what you want to be illegal.
In recent years the biggest complaint online is that companies have been forcing employees back to the office so they can be less isolated. If companies were conspiring to isolate coworkers from each other as much as possible, return to office is the last thing you would expect to see.
> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together and have events (on company time) that got teams mixing and socializing across departments.
Really depends. These are people in the same social class. But I have never seen a cleaning lady that works as a contractor being invited to a corporate party event.
> forcing employees back to the office so they can be less isolated.
They're forcing employees back to office so they can have more control.
> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together
Sure, get together for "team building" to increase productivity. Just don't do anything problematic like discuss your salary or benefits with any of your coworkers.
at the largest platforms they purposely curate communities of workers to get to know each other (this study seems to not include them)
This is because data annotation platforms have very low lock in and workers jump between them opportunistically, so they want to rely on as many (small) network effects as possible
Doing the hard work of mapping out the complex ways workers (labor) and corporate entities (capital) interact across national boundaries should be applauded, especially given the historical context that such relationships are highly exploitative.
surprised that this map does not include the largest 3-5 platforms
Most data annotation comes from educated Western countries atp (the $2 meme is kind of old now since the industry has moved onto RL envs) where the annotators routinely earn multiple times the local median wage.
is that true? from looking at the map it seems there are workers and customers in europe, but usually these are separate? most europe workers working for US based entities, and most customers buying from different US entities
I think if a certain HN crowd doesn’t like the phrasing of “AI colonialism,” just substitute in “capitalism” and maybe it’ll sit better with your personal opinion (for better or worse).
Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism and it cheapens the word when we call it that. This isn't in the same universe as being forced to work to death in a sugarcane field or a gold mine.
> Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism
Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
Colonialism doesn't mean you make people do back-breaking manual labor; it means you exploit people far away to extract capital from where they are so people nearby can enjoy the fruits of others without having to do the work themselves.
> Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
To the extent these claims are true (and I'm sure that varies by location), those are the primary problems, not the fact that people are being offered jobs they seem to prefer to other jobs.
But it was also stated that their labor is extracted, which sounds like slavery, and that they are exploited, which sounds like fraud, and that they take some psychic damage, which sounds like a JRPG. Those would all be bad things.
> Providing relatively good paying jobs that people can do while sitting in an air conditioned room is hardly colonialism and it cheapens the word when we call it that.
Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people.
So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism.
The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism.
Wrong framing. I'm saying that any trade between a colonizer nation and a colonized nation is undeniably made different by the lasting effects of colonialism. There are mitigations for this that many academics have advocated for, but they all require the developed world to cede money and power to the undeveloped one, which historically hasn't been a great pitch. But until it's done, you can't divorce these things from one another and no international trade can be truly, squeaky clean.
It's also worth noting that so, so, so much of our trade right now is anything but. Exporting ships for wrecking in India, the entire fast-fashion industry, chocolate, coffee, lithium mining, so many industries are absolutely hip-deep in the abusive nature of colonialism. Data labeling/moderation are just the most recent iterations of the same shameful tradition.
The second time I read the output I pay for, some of the words are modified to say the opposite. Is there a map of the hidden global labor powering that?
Everybody who works for money is exploited. Not if theyre exploited, but how much.
And yeah, humans are being bought per hour to do AI training. Ok. Are they at least paid decently? Of course not! The surplus (work's worth - wages) is always captured by the Capitalist class.
Do they have to look at horrible content? Yeah. Part of the job and the danger when dealing with use-uploaded content. Is the problem just the horrible content, or is it about pay?
Also, this is regarding US AI companies according to the map. How are the Chinese doing their LLM training? Internally? Global South as well? Wherever they're doing it, is their pay better? Cause this map doesnt have anything regarding China... Or the EU either.
I'm not being exploited any more than I'm exploiting my employer, that's a toxic way to look at voluntary interactions of people doing their best to escape suffering and death.
It's in the interest of your employer to get the greatest amount of value for the smallest wage. That's not a moral statement about your particular employer, that's just a rational actor model of economics. In turn it's in your interest to expand least labor for the greatest pay. The asymmetry is your employer is an institution that can put incalculable resources into imposing its utility on you, from union busting and productivity spyware to lobbying national policy and conspiring to tilt the labor market... An employer can go months without significant fractions of employees, they can hire an entire hidden backup department in case of a strike, but you'll probably quickly starve without ongoing employment.
And it is in my interest to charge my employer as much as they will pay for my work, regardless of whether or not I would have done it for less. In many cases, I would have, but I still negotiated for more.
There are many problems with modern capitalism and the political economy of the world. If you have ideas about how we can build a better system, I genuinely wish you luck.
I think the fact we take the temperature of the market and label it as a "strong" or "weak labor force" is a counterfactual to the idea there's equivalent exploitation.
It's mutually beneficial (otherwise one party or the other would terminate the contract), but that a wide window for the balance of benefits to shift.
Have you ever looked at the living standards in communist countries? Do you really expect that communism will improve anything for anyone other than the party bosses?
One can agree to the findings in Das Kapital, and also not agree to the claims of the Communist Manifesto.
And to be fair, quite a few of the findings are basically restatements from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Then again, most 'economists' rarely ever get past page 30 of that treatise, like all the "unseen hands that realllly have to prevent monopolies etc etc etc"
Dude, it worked for a billion people in China, lol.
I grew up under communism. I don't like or don't care for communism, but I can't dispute that China lifted a huge number of people out of a warlord torn mess and misery. To some extent, Soviets did the same to Russian peasants, but of course, it got perverted along the way. But all things considered, I would take communism under soviets to being a serf under the Tsar.
>Dude, it worked for a billion people in China, lol.
China starved tens of millions of people for two decades, it was only after they started opening up the economy in the 70s and allowed people to own farms/shops that living standards started increasing.
All fun and games until it’s the value of your labor that AI is impacting. What terms will you come up with that signals to your peers that you’re part of the in-group? Probably something very masculine and edgy to show that you should be taken very seriously, but in a very cool way. Maybe something like “knowledge economy arbitrage”.
It’s worth talking about. There is probably a very fine line between standard outsourcing and some form of colonialism. To me Chinese companies building ports in African countries where they bring in their own workers and then set up situations where the home country defaults and the port defaults to China is definitely some form of colonialism.
I'm a person who believes an activist has already decided the conclusion and just finds whatever facts they need to fit their narrative. They also use BS terms like AI colonialism and other nonsensical meaningless words to manipulate people emotionally.
So yes I think this is claptrap of the first order that exists so people can pretend it's of any value to reaffirm their echo chamber.
That seems like an ad hominem attack to me, as you haven't really addressed conclusion the research points to: Why are all of the worst jobs in the industry predominantly exported to the global south?
I think it's easy to conclude that the companies can more easily exploit workers in these locations, which points to colonialism and capitalist incentives. Instead of dismissing someone's research because of guilt by association, perhaps you can explain why this is not an exploitative practice?
"Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people." -- And you see nothing about that seems like it could possibly be a way to describe the current AI landscape? Perhaps you jumping ship because you see a buzzword, or something you have decided is a buzzword is just you being mentally lazy?
I think the problem many people have with the word colonialism, besides the incredible amount of overuse and misuse, is that by the definition you provided you can label almost any international interaction as colonialism if there is even a slight imbalance by loosening the meaning of "domination". There are certainly countries that have dominated others e.g. China and Tibet but the vast majority have much more complex relationships. Take the US and Mexico, does the US dominate Mexico? They have a great deal of influence in Mexico but that doesn't seem to prevent the Mexican government or its people from acting in ways opposed to the US. They still have to negotiate treaties and enforce them imperfectly. For a strict definition of domination, this isn't it.
It helps to also attempt to imagine a total absence of colonialism. Using a strict definition of domination this isn't too difficult though it may still be unlikely to ever occur. Using a loose definition you have to assume a world in which no country has any political, social, economic or cultural advantage over another. The simplest way to do this is to imagine a world of total isolationism where no country interacts with any other. Either that or a world in which only a single nation (or perhaps only three) exists. Neither are the happiest nor most diverse outcomes one would wish for. Imagining a perfect balance seems impossible, international trade requires it, differences in population size, productivity and resource distribution enforce it. Beyond that how would you even start to prevent a difference in say cultural influence? Even among Western nations there are enormous cultural gradients. Canada has tried to mandate the distribution of its own cultural media within its borders but even that isn't enough to prevent being swamped by the sheer volume of output from the US. China has the Great Firewall and yet its citizenry still demands access to Western culture.
So for any definition of colonialism you should also provide and abide by a definition of domination.
No because I'm not captured ideologically. You can run open source models (which are ever improving) and there is no moat for AI neither in software or hardware. Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me it's not the pot calling the kettle black.
Colonialism is so overused as a term it's pointless. By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism and Bangladesh apparel colonialism.
Who can run open source models? Everyone in the world, or only a small subset of the population with access to computing products that are powerful enough to run models? Who builds those computing products? Where do their raw materials come from? Where are they mined and processed? Who manufactures and assembles the parts?
> (which are ever improving)
How are they being improved? Are moderation and data labeling jobs usually done by the same people who consume the outputs of the models, or are they outsourced for paltry wages?
> there is no moat for AI neither in software or hardware
No moat for whom? Can the data labelers above start their own AI hardware company?
> Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me it's not the pot calling the kettle black
So we should settle for inaction?
> By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism
Where does the lithium for electric car batteries come from? What about other rare minerals?
> Bangladesh apparel colonialism
Aren't the people in sweatshops the exploited ones? And the ones who consume the products of their labor the colonialists?
This is just a blatant ad hominem, and more shows on your character that'd you'd attack a person, rather than the ideas/claims.
Who cares what the person describes themselves as. Do the claims being made validate with evidence, or not enough evidence, or are invalidated BY evidence?
If the claims are valid and provable, who cares about some label-bingo.
"Who cares what the person describes themselves as."
Because quite often, when done very vocally and publicly, it tends to be a lie or a cover for some other nefarious thing happening behind the scenes. See Donald Trump.
There's a certain elitist mindset that thinks all real value is in hard labour like farming, construction and white collar work is shown to be fake and exploitative.
> To filter out disturbing images or posts, or to keep chatbots from creating such content, AI systems have to be able to recognize it. That means that data workers must view horrifying images or text passages to label that content
This kind of work is definitely preferable to poverty, or even preferable to toiling in the farms. Its a decent job and some one has to do it and I'm glad someone who needs the money is doing it. I think it is misleading to portray this kind of job as uniquely harmful or stressful.
We consider psychological stress in a different category than physical. It's seen as uniquely cruel because it corrupts intangible things like identity and humanity, not knees and joints. We get physically laborious jobs... They're grueling but we understand the inputs, outputs and the toll.
Putting someone in front of the worst of humanity (CSAM, murder, suicide, bestiality etc) for 9 hours a day at $2/hr seems inhumane because it may very well change who they are and how they think. Add to that the fact that it's sponsored by the richest companies on the planet for the benefit of the upper half and you get the current, IMO justified, criticisms.
someone has to do it but it's not a decent job. Content tagging and content moderation are basically the "ditch digging" of the white collar world and often comes with significant toll on those exposed to such content continuously.
It doesn’t have to be black and white though. Consider the alternative where in addition to the $2/hr pay, the people are provided with support and training to also help reduce the adverse effects of sitting in front of such content. Wouldn’t that or other ways to mitigate the effects be better?
I am not saying it isn’t done today. Just that we should consider that as an option when coming from either side of this debate.
Isn't it kind of patriarchal to say that people in the third world shouldn't do jobs that they choose to do, because people in the first world think it's too exploitative? Give them tools that let them connect to other workers and organize, sure, but I think we should respect their autonomy to take the jobs they want to take.
I don't see how your reply connects with what the parent said. But to your point, I don't think anyone in this conversation specifically claimed anything about workers of the third world needing to be prevented from taking these jobs, but rather how they're universally harmful to the human mind.
This could imply banning the industry, but since most agree it's necessary, most would probably be in favor of psychological counciling and greater pay for these workers.
The point is we're subjecting desperate people to trauma before limited to first responders, police, and military, while providing them none of the pay, job security, or counciling of these above specialities.
Not really - studies have linked these jobs to severe phycological distress. They aren't "good jobs" in the sense that "software developer" is a good job. They're actively harmful to the person's mental well-being.
>but I think we should respect their autonomy to take the jobs they want to take.
You're phrasing this like third world countries have similar labor markets to the US, where anyone and anybody can go and find a high paying, "comfy" job.
Third world countries provide the convenience that first world countries like the US have come to expect. The cost of providing that "convenience" is that millions of people in India/China/Africa/Southeast Asia work for almost nothing to produce cheap crap that people buy in the US and then dispose of like it's nothing.
People in white shirts can't sit in air-conditioned rooms and program computers if other people aren't out there growing and harvesting and shipping food.
I think you need to pause and consider how significant the mind is in the body. I've lived in my car before and I will take that over consistent psychological distress of something like that. I don't think that's universal but I really think viewing awful images and text all the time would fuck me up.
The article states three reasons for doing so, but all of them are very cringe baity words.
Low paid workers are due to local economy government doing jack to improve their wages in the first place. In China, competition is high, thus low pay (with other reasons such as real estate crashes, etc)
Visualization makes sense but does not mean it's colonialism as colonialism requires forced intervention, and there is no such play here.
Cool project bad political motivated wordings in the post.
This is very important. To isolate workers to make them powerless gives even more power to companies that are already very powerful.
It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments.
It was always employees who resisted it the most. Most wanted to stay in their lane and limit their social circles to a few coworkers they liked.
> It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments
I can't actually tell what you're talking about or what you want to be illegal.
In recent years the biggest complaint online is that companies have been forcing employees back to the office so they can be less isolated. If companies were conspiring to isolate coworkers from each other as much as possible, return to office is the last thing you would expect to see.
Really depends. These are people in the same social class. But I have never seen a cleaning lady that works as a contractor being invited to a corporate party event.
They're forcing employees back to office so they can have more control.
> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together
Sure, get together for "team building" to increase productivity. Just don't do anything problematic like discuss your salary or benefits with any of your coworkers.
This is because data annotation platforms have very low lock in and workers jump between them opportunistically, so they want to rely on as many (small) network effects as possible
It's preemptive union busting.
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
Always a good reminder that the first batch of RLHF was outsourced Kenyan workers
Most data annotation comes from educated Western countries atp (the $2 meme is kind of old now since the industry has moved onto RL envs) where the annotators routinely earn multiple times the local median wage.
Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
Colonialism doesn't mean you make people do back-breaking manual labor; it means you exploit people far away to extract capital from where they are so people nearby can enjoy the fruits of others without having to do the work themselves.
To the extent these claims are true (and I'm sure that varies by location), those are the primary problems, not the fact that people are being offered jobs they seem to prefer to other jobs.
Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people.
So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism.
The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism.
It's also worth noting that so, so, so much of our trade right now is anything but. Exporting ships for wrecking in India, the entire fast-fashion industry, chocolate, coffee, lithium mining, so many industries are absolutely hip-deep in the abusive nature of colonialism. Data labeling/moderation are just the most recent iterations of the same shameful tradition.
To be fair, that's pretty explicitly what the organisation hosting it is all about.
And yeah, humans are being bought per hour to do AI training. Ok. Are they at least paid decently? Of course not! The surplus (work's worth - wages) is always captured by the Capitalist class.
Do they have to look at horrible content? Yeah. Part of the job and the danger when dealing with use-uploaded content. Is the problem just the horrible content, or is it about pay?
Also, this is regarding US AI companies according to the map. How are the Chinese doing their LLM training? Internally? Global South as well? Wherever they're doing it, is their pay better? Cause this map doesnt have anything regarding China... Or the EU either.
There are many problems with modern capitalism and the political economy of the world. If you have ideas about how we can build a better system, I genuinely wish you luck.
"Voluntary" is not a word I would use to describe any agreement where one side is choosing between the deal and physical danger or potential death.
It's mutually beneficial (otherwise one party or the other would terminate the contract), but that a wide window for the balance of benefits to shift.
And to be fair, quite a few of the findings are basically restatements from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Then again, most 'economists' rarely ever get past page 30 of that treatise, like all the "unseen hands that realllly have to prevent monopolies etc etc etc"
I grew up under communism. I don't like or don't care for communism, but I can't dispute that China lifted a huge number of people out of a warlord torn mess and misery. To some extent, Soviets did the same to Russian peasants, but of course, it got perverted along the way. But all things considered, I would take communism under soviets to being a serf under the Tsar.
China starved tens of millions of people for two decades, it was only after they started opening up the economy in the 70s and allowed people to own farms/shops that living standards started increasing.
Call it "colonialism" if you want but it screams "fake moralism"
So yes I think this is claptrap of the first order that exists so people can pretend it's of any value to reaffirm their echo chamber.
I think it's easy to conclude that the companies can more easily exploit workers in these locations, which points to colonialism and capitalist incentives. Instead of dismissing someone's research because of guilt by association, perhaps you can explain why this is not an exploitative practice?
It helps to also attempt to imagine a total absence of colonialism. Using a strict definition of domination this isn't too difficult though it may still be unlikely to ever occur. Using a loose definition you have to assume a world in which no country has any political, social, economic or cultural advantage over another. The simplest way to do this is to imagine a world of total isolationism where no country interacts with any other. Either that or a world in which only a single nation (or perhaps only three) exists. Neither are the happiest nor most diverse outcomes one would wish for. Imagining a perfect balance seems impossible, international trade requires it, differences in population size, productivity and resource distribution enforce it. Beyond that how would you even start to prevent a difference in say cultural influence? Even among Western nations there are enormous cultural gradients. Canada has tried to mandate the distribution of its own cultural media within its borders but even that isn't enough to prevent being swamped by the sheer volume of output from the US. China has the Great Firewall and yet its citizenry still demands access to Western culture.
So for any definition of colonialism you should also provide and abide by a definition of domination.
Colonialism is so overused as a term it's pointless. By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism and Bangladesh apparel colonialism.
Who can run open source models? Everyone in the world, or only a small subset of the population with access to computing products that are powerful enough to run models? Who builds those computing products? Where do their raw materials come from? Where are they mined and processed? Who manufactures and assembles the parts?
> (which are ever improving)
How are they being improved? Are moderation and data labeling jobs usually done by the same people who consume the outputs of the models, or are they outsourced for paltry wages?
> there is no moat for AI neither in software or hardware
No moat for whom? Can the data labelers above start their own AI hardware company?
> Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me it's not the pot calling the kettle black
So we should settle for inaction?
> By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism
Where does the lithium for electric car batteries come from? What about other rare minerals?
> Bangladesh apparel colonialism
Aren't the people in sweatshops the exploited ones? And the ones who consume the products of their labor the colonialists?
The most complete capture is the one so internalized it doesn't even register as ideology anymore.
Who cares what the person describes themselves as. Do the claims being made validate with evidence, or not enough evidence, or are invalidated BY evidence?
If the claims are valid and provable, who cares about some label-bingo.
Because quite often, when done very vocally and publicly, it tends to be a lie or a cover for some other nefarious thing happening behind the scenes. See Donald Trump.
And that fact taints everything from the get-go.
> To filter out disturbing images or posts, or to keep chatbots from creating such content, AI systems have to be able to recognize it. That means that data workers must view horrifying images or text passages to label that content
This kind of work is definitely preferable to poverty, or even preferable to toiling in the farms. Its a decent job and some one has to do it and I'm glad someone who needs the money is doing it. I think it is misleading to portray this kind of job as uniquely harmful or stressful.
Putting someone in front of the worst of humanity (CSAM, murder, suicide, bestiality etc) for 9 hours a day at $2/hr seems inhumane because it may very well change who they are and how they think. Add to that the fact that it's sponsored by the richest companies on the planet for the benefit of the upper half and you get the current, IMO justified, criticisms.
someone has to do it but it's not a decent job. Content tagging and content moderation are basically the "ditch digging" of the white collar world and often comes with significant toll on those exposed to such content continuously.
I am not saying it isn’t done today. Just that we should consider that as an option when coming from either side of this debate.
This could imply banning the industry, but since most agree it's necessary, most would probably be in favor of psychological counciling and greater pay for these workers.
The point is we're subjecting desperate people to trauma before limited to first responders, police, and military, while providing them none of the pay, job security, or counciling of these above specialities.
[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti0o4RhOtjQ
You're phrasing this like third world countries have similar labor markets to the US, where anyone and anybody can go and find a high paying, "comfy" job.
Third world countries provide the convenience that first world countries like the US have come to expect. The cost of providing that "convenience" is that millions of people in India/China/Africa/Southeast Asia work for almost nothing to produce cheap crap that people buy in the US and then dispose of like it's nothing.