To make an AI chat bot behave, Kenyan workers say they were 'mentally scarred' by graphic text
Workers were hired to label offensive text snippets for OpenAI and ChatGPT, according to a Time report.
ChatGPT has impressed millions with its ability to string together coherent, sometimes even accurate, sentences, blurbs, scripts, and more. To write like a human, the AI bot was trained with machine learning algorithms on a massive catalogue of material scoured from the web. But the development of ChatGPT wasn't all automated: Human labour was required to stop ChatGPT falling into the same trap as its predecessor GPT-3, which was capable of making inappropriate, sometimes even racist(opens in new tab), comments.
According to a recent investigation by Time(opens in new tab), ChatGPT creator OpenAI outsourced this unsavory data processing task to Kenyan workers, many of whom reportedly earn less than $2 an hour.
ChatGPT is trained on datasets of such an immense size that they can't be closely curated by hand, as are image generation tools such as DALL-E (also operated by OpenAI), Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney. Without training, ChatGPT wouldn't work at all, but not all of the text you can find on the internet leads to the kind of comments you want your AI bot making.