A Time investigation has exposed the murkier side of the AI chatbot industry, highlighting how at least one startup has been using questionable practices.
A Time investigation has exposed the murkier side of the AI chatbot industry, highlighting how at least one startup has been using questionable practices to improve its technology.
Published on Wednesday, Time’s report focuses on Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its ChatGPT chatbot, a technology that’s gained much attention recently for its remarkable ability to produce highly natural conversational text.
Time’s probe found that to train the AI technology, OpenAI used the services of a team in Kenya to pore over text that included disturbing subject matter such as child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest. And for their efforts to label the abhorrent content, many in the team received less than $2 an hour.
The work, which started in November 2021, was necessary as ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-3, while impressive, had a tendency to spew out offensive content as its training dataset had been compiled by scraping hundreds of billions of words from all corners of the web.
The Kenya-based team, operated by San Francisco firm Sama, would label the offensive content to help train OpenAI’s chatbot, thereby improving its dataset and reducing the chances of any objectionable output.
