<story><title>OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic</title><url>https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dylan604</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve heard arguments in the past of paying &amp;quot;acceptable&amp;quot; US wages to people in other countries would destabilize the other country more than it would help. I&amp;#x27;m not an economist, so I don&amp;#x27;t know how valid those arguments are. I have always thought they were more scare tactics used in favor of being able to pay those low wages for as long as they could get away with it. I could see though how paying a small-ish number of people wages that dwarfs the larger number of people could cause a bit of turmoil.&lt;p&gt;to me, it goes back to the argument about remote workers should be paid less than the in office worker. or workers living in cheaper areas should be paid less than those living in expensive areas. to me, the salary should be paying for the work being done and that&amp;#x27;s it. if the same level of work is being done by both employees, it shouldn&amp;#x27;t matter if one is in Kenya and the other is in the US. the value of the work is what should be getting compensated. again though, i&amp;#x27;m no economist.</text></item><item><author>yawboakye</author><text>fellow african here, with a few questions.&lt;p&gt;could the average income in kenya be around $1.25 because companies decide to pay abysmally? or the people don&amp;#x27;t merit any higher? would openai be offending the kenyans if they paid them, say, $5&amp;#x2F;hour? i think this is the question you should grapple with. openai will be selling this tech around the world, and i wonder if these $2&amp;#x2F;hr workers can afford it at all. would they, or their loved ones, be able to enjoy produce of their labor?</text></item><item><author>Ombudsman</author><text>To put it in perspective, the average income in Kenya is around $1.25 an hour and tbh (as a Kenyan) I really can&amp;#x27;t see it as a bad thing. A lot of people here live in abject poverty, they live in situations you can&amp;#x27;t really begin to imagine. So any sort of help coming our way is good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>NickC25</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve heard arguments in the past of paying &amp;quot;acceptable&amp;quot; US wages to people in other countries would destabilize the other country more than it would help.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which honestly is a bullshit argument.  The only destabilizing thing here is it would make the person in the higher-paying profession more valuable to society and more able to make economic impact where it might not normally.  In this case, a rising tide does lift all boats...because you&amp;#x27;re giving more economic purchasing power to more people.  Will this kill some businesses or disrupt the status quo? Yeah.  Will it help more people than it hurts?  Maybe, probably, who knows?  But I personally see no problem with paying people relative to their output, no matter where in the world they are.&lt;p&gt;Having been to Kenya myself and worked with Kenyan developers for several years, most of whom were quite talented, I see absolutely no problem with paying them their value relative to the work being done.  I have no problem with high skilled Kenyans making much more than the local average because they have a skill that is in demand all around the world.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;the salary should be paying for the work being done and that&amp;#x27;s it&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;100% agree.  If a business derives $X profit from a laborer and agrees to pay a given % of $X to the laborer as compensation, it should not matter if the laborer is in a high cost or low cost of living area - the business still makes the same amount in profit, and shouldn&amp;#x27;t get to say &amp;quot;hey yeah we made $10mm off your application, but we&amp;#x27;re going to only pay you 5% of our profits as compensation because you live in Bangladesh and the cost of living is lower, so be happy with what we&amp;#x27;re giving you&amp;quot; when if you did the exact same labor and lived in, say, LA or NYC, they&amp;#x27;d give you 10%.  Just bullshit IMO.</text></comment>
<story><title>OpenAI used Kenyan workers on less than $2 per hour to make ChatGPT less toxic</title><url>https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dylan604</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve heard arguments in the past of paying &amp;quot;acceptable&amp;quot; US wages to people in other countries would destabilize the other country more than it would help. I&amp;#x27;m not an economist, so I don&amp;#x27;t know how valid those arguments are. I have always thought they were more scare tactics used in favor of being able to pay those low wages for as long as they could get away with it. I could see though how paying a small-ish number of people wages that dwarfs the larger number of people could cause a bit of turmoil.&lt;p&gt;to me, it goes back to the argument about remote workers should be paid less than the in office worker. or workers living in cheaper areas should be paid less than those living in expensive areas. to me, the salary should be paying for the work being done and that&amp;#x27;s it. if the same level of work is being done by both employees, it shouldn&amp;#x27;t matter if one is in Kenya and the other is in the US. the value of the work is what should be getting compensated. again though, i&amp;#x27;m no economist.</text></item><item><author>yawboakye</author><text>fellow african here, with a few questions.&lt;p&gt;could the average income in kenya be around $1.25 because companies decide to pay abysmally? or the people don&amp;#x27;t merit any higher? would openai be offending the kenyans if they paid them, say, $5&amp;#x2F;hour? i think this is the question you should grapple with. openai will be selling this tech around the world, and i wonder if these $2&amp;#x2F;hr workers can afford it at all. would they, or their loved ones, be able to enjoy produce of their labor?</text></item><item><author>Ombudsman</author><text>To put it in perspective, the average income in Kenya is around $1.25 an hour and tbh (as a Kenyan) I really can&amp;#x27;t see it as a bad thing. A lot of people here live in abject poverty, they live in situations you can&amp;#x27;t really begin to imagine. So any sort of help coming our way is good.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blagie</author><text>The basic argument is a little bit different. There is a huge population in Kenya living, or in some places, failing to live for under $2&amp;#x2F;day. Most of these people are independent -- for example, street-side sellers in an urban slum, or living in a village far from Nairobi.&lt;p&gt;The key question is how we improve lives of these people.&lt;p&gt;It is difficult for me to overstate the impact a 5-fold improvement in income has on people&amp;#x27;s lives. I&amp;#x27;ve seen initiatives which train people to do tasks like basic data entry, bricklaying, or otherwise, taking $2&amp;#x2F;day workers to be $10&amp;#x2F;day workers. Programs like these are typically a few months long. They don&amp;#x27;t train people to have the equivalent of even a middle school diploma, and they won&amp;#x27;t be competitive with even the least educated Western workers.&lt;p&gt;Still, breaking generational poverty is a long process, and that basic increased stability is a first step.&lt;p&gt;If we shut off employment paths following those programs by giving bad PR to anyone who employs people for $2&amp;#x2F;hour, we&amp;#x27;ve doomed a key pathway for hundreds of millions of people to escape abject poverty.&lt;p&gt;Gapminder shows four income levels:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gapminder.org&amp;#x2F;fw&amp;#x2F;income-levels&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gapminder.org&amp;#x2F;fw&amp;#x2F;income-levels&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Westerners tend to group levels 1-3 together. However, the gap in quality-of-life from level 1 to level 2 is much greater than the rest of the stack. Level 1, life basically sucks. Hunger, lack of basic life-saving medicine, and early death.&lt;p&gt;Levels 2-4, I&amp;#x27;ve lived at (for at least a few months), and it&amp;#x27;s okay once you get used to it.&lt;p&gt;It takes surprisingly little to bring people from 1 to 2, and these sorts of jobs are one way to do that.&lt;p&gt;As a footnote: People often confuse financial stress with simply being poor, since in the US, those correlate almost completely. Financial stress sucks. Most people worldwide living at levels 2-3 don&amp;#x27;t have high levels of financial stress. A much more typical situation is a village, where no one has a lot of stuff, but people own the land and their homes. Financial stress sucks. I&amp;#x27;d rather own a home at Level 3, with savings, a stable family, income, etc. than live paycheck-to-paycheck at Level 4.</text></comment>