<story><title>Underage workers are training AI</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-data-labeling-children/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjscott</author><text>This is a weird article. It starts with an anecdote about someone extremely poor who &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; needs some money, and how that person found a job with flexible hours and comfortable working conditions which paid relatively well. And then the article acts like this is obviously a horrible scandal that must be stopped.&lt;p&gt;Even if the allegations of &amp;quot;traumatizing content&amp;quot; are true and not exaggerated cherry-picking, shouldn&amp;#x27;t the decisions here be made by the people actually involved? When well-meaning, well-fed people take away their choices (and income), this isn&amp;#x27;t exactly doing them a favor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattdeboard</author><text>Your critique of the article is sensible to a point. But your analysis is incomplete. I’m gonna lay out a few predicates hopefully we can all agree on as true, then get to my point.&lt;p&gt;First, hopefully you can agree that, fundamentally, the company paying these child workers is trading money for labor. (This shouldn’t be controversial, it’s a fact of labor markets.)&lt;p&gt;Second, the companies paying these children are extracting value from their labor greater than what they are paying the child laborers.&lt;p&gt;Third, the employers chose laborers located “predominantly … in East Africa, Venezuela, Pakistan, India, and the Philippines” for this work because that’s where they can pay the least in labor costs while still extracting value.&lt;p&gt;Fourth, keeping labor costs as low as possible while extracting maximum value is the most rational course of action.&lt;p&gt;Fifth, and finally, it is very rational for children to seek out &amp;amp; undertake this work — to exchange their labor for money — given the economics of their lives.&lt;p&gt;With these predicates laid out, my point: The reason your analysis doesn’t lead you to thinking this is a raw deal for the children involved is because in a sense, it’s not. Given the economics of their lives, this is, relatively speaking, a good deal.&lt;p&gt;The rawness of the deal only becomes apparent when we start to inspect why material conditions are such that this deal — trading an hour of labor for $2 to a company serving a multi-billion-dollar market — is enticing to &lt;i&gt;children&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;In other words, this article, in &lt;i&gt;my&lt;/i&gt; analysis, is an opportunity to study and question the system that creates the conditions such that there is a labor market comprising children who are available for exploitation for cheap labor by very rich Western companies.</text></comment>
<story><title>Underage workers are training AI</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/artificial-intelligence-data-labeling-children/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pjscott</author><text>This is a weird article. It starts with an anecdote about someone extremely poor who &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; needs some money, and how that person found a job with flexible hours and comfortable working conditions which paid relatively well. And then the article acts like this is obviously a horrible scandal that must be stopped.&lt;p&gt;Even if the allegations of &amp;quot;traumatizing content&amp;quot; are true and not exaggerated cherry-picking, shouldn&amp;#x27;t the decisions here be made by the people actually involved? When well-meaning, well-fed people take away their choices (and income), this isn&amp;#x27;t exactly doing them a favor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ben_w</author><text>I have every reason to assume the traumatising content examples are the point of the data classification exercise — I mean, filtering such content is probably the single largest expense of large forums and social media sites, so of course loads of people would want to train an AI to do it for them.&lt;p&gt;As for giving people agency over their working conditions… I don&amp;#x27;t know — every so often there&amp;#x27;s an argument about prostitution, where people argue against it because it&amp;#x27;s dangerous, and then someone points out how all work carries some risk and someone says something about capitalism forcing men to effectively sell their lungs to coal mines which are much more dangerous than women selling their bodies, and everyone gets cross and a few months later there&amp;#x27;s a similar debate like nobody learned anything.</text></comment>