ChatGPT and Exploitation of Black and Brown Workers

The only reason why ChatGPT was able to be rolled out to the general public at all, is because of the exploitation of Black and brown people. 

At the beginning of this year, Time Magazine release an exclusive covering some of the labor involved in getting ChatGPT public-ready. ChatGPT was trained with online information and text.

Of course, online information also contains deeply disturbing and traumatic information.

In order to filter out harmful content such as violence, sexual abuse, and hate speech, OpenAI had to create a mechanism that would help ChatGPT filter those out. And in order to create that mechanism or that detector, the content that is going into ChatGPT to be trained needs to be labeled.

Deeply disturbing and traumatic data that needs to be labeled.

So OpenAI hired a company called Sana, which focuses on AI data training. And then Sana in turn hires workers, mostly from Black and brown countries. 

In the Time Magazine article specifically, Kenyan workers were interviewed. Their pay was about $1.32 to $2 an hour to read through extremely horrific content for hours. Because the content from OpenAI was getting so disturbing, Sana actually terminated their contract early. Because the content was not only working with text, but they had begun moving onto images.

The Kenyan workers talk about how they’re completely traumatized. They have recurring visions, that it was like torture, and have PTSD. An example that one of the workers brings up is that it was difficult to teach ChatGPT the nuances like the difference between sex, which is consensual, and r*pe, which is not.

So just imagine all of the content that these workers had to go through. 

And note how this continues imperialist practices by colonial countries like the US, which are based on histories and current practices of exploiting Black and brown people. And that has all created generational trauma, which we know about and that is continuing to happen.

Colonialism and white dominance are very much alive and active, happening still at the expense of people’s lives. Companies and governments have to be held accountable.