Brown student maps the hidden global labor powering AI

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.

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.

[0] I might point you to Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". Leaving aside the author's intent, there are some chapters in the latter parts of the book replete with references to such events.

- I would say that extracting capital from labor does not constitute "slavery" in the sense of either de facto or de jure "ownership" of humans, but a wider interpretation of the word may apply.

- Exploitation doesn't have to be fraud. People can be willingly exploited. If we imagine for the sake of argument that human suffering can be quantified, and we imagine a person who starts from a place of, say, a 10 on an arbitrary scale where that's pretty bad (and 0 is no suffering), they may "choose" to take a job that reduces their suffering to an 8. Despite the reduction in suffering, someone else benefits from this arrangement more than the suffering human, and the benefited person could have chosen to reduce the suffering further but for the increase of their profit. This is still exploitation, even if the sufferer was made aware of all the circumstances up front.

- I said that the people's psyches were damaged; nothing about "psychic damage". One example of damage to the psyche is being asked to classify images of CSAM for eight hours a day. Regardless of the pay, this causes damage to people with even the barest shred of empathy.

To be fair, that's pretty explicitly what the organisation hosting it is all about.

I don’t know why academics think that uttering the right words will actually change anything, they’re not Gandalf.

> 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.

If anything it's patronizing to say that staring at disturbing content all day is preferable to agricultural jobs, you know, the jobs people have been working and enjoying for literally tens of thousands of years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Colonialism is so overused as a term it's pointless. By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism and Bangladesh apparel colonialism.

The most complete capture is the one so internalized it doesn't even register as ideology anymore.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

Edit: And neither our company (a very active, profitable company that sells data to almost all major AI players) nor none of our relevant competition is on this map for some reason. Mercor, Scale, Surge, and Snorkel would be the top players I'd expect to see here. This map has none of them?

It does have Cognizant, which is a international body shop / cheap consultancy that's been around long before LLMs, and mostly builds cheap software fast for existing companies. It also has NextWealth, a company with approximately 1% of the revenue of even the smallest stateside RL Env and labelling players. I'm not sure this map displays literally any meaningful data about the "global labor powering AI"?

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.

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.

"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.

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.

The difference lies in the power dynamic: if you don't like the terms, you can look elsewhere to find a better fit; if the employer doesn't like the terms, you may find yourself out of a job faster than you can replace it. For some people it may not be a big deal, but for many it's a significant factor in how hard they push for what they feel would be fair compensation.

No it's not necessarily, because employment is a repeated game with public information.

(Other people can see how much you're paying people by checking levels.fyi/blind/etc.)

There's better ways to motivate people anyway - thus tech companies pay with stock grants and performance bonuses.

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.

This is just one instance: a hepatitis drug named Solvaldi. Costs $1000 a pill, need 84 pills for full course. How much does the drug actually cost? $300 and you can make it with the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective's chemistry reactor.

But why is this capitalist deaths? Cause 5 million people per year die from Hepatitis. And this drug is a *cure*. But insurance wont pay the $84000 needed for the cure. So they get maintenance drugs that dont cure, and those people die from it needlessly.

And the numbers are going up to 6 million a year of needless capitalist deaths, from a single drug.

We can easily look at corporate death panels, err, I mean medical insurance. Its insurance fraud if we lie, but to them, they can just deny treatment and wait out the death clock.

Capitalism is even more extractive and devastating on the populace. And instead of "capitalism causes X million deaths a year", nope, its a individual's fault. Its always the individuals fault, no matter how systemic the problem is.

Of course, it's probably not really possible to do such a comparison, because there are so many other factors, and state intervention is everywhere even in capitalist countries, via publicly funded research.

I think the only really fair way to compare which system causes more deaths than the other is to look at overall health outcomes and lifespans.

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"

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's preemptive union busting.

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.

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.

I work fully remote, by necessity. But it’s not better. I’m less in touch with everything going on inside and outside my teams, than I was when I was in-office 9-5.

It's silly to assume people are better at coordinating work in office.

It is about control, even if it's just about controlling how you interact with your coworkers.

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.