Kenyan content moderators who removed harmful content produced by OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, have petitioned the country’s lawmakers to investigate the nature of their work. The petitioners are calling for an investigation into the “nature of the work, the conditions of the work, and the operations” of the Big Tech companies that outsource services in Kenya through companies like Sama. Sama has been hit with several litigations on alleged exploitation, union-busting, and illegal mass layoffs of content moderators. The workers are asking lawmakers to “regulate the outsourcing of harmful and dangerous
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, recently visited Lagos, Nigeria, as part of his global tour to promote AI adoption and understand diverse perspectives. However, concerns have been raised about the exploitation of Kenyan content moderators and the impact of OpenAI’s technology on marginalized communities. Nigeria: Africa’s biggest OpenAI adopter Over the weekend, Altman took part in a two-day exclusive event at Muson Centre, Lagos, Nigeria. “Nigeria, among all of the countries on the continent, I believe has been the biggest adopter of our technologies,” Technext reports Altman told
Tade Oyerinde is empowering students to complete their first two years of college without taking on any debt through his community college startup Campus. As per Forbes, Campus has secured $29 million in a Series A funding round led by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Discord founder Jason Citron to expand the college. Other investors in the round include Figma founder Dylan Field; former head of Stripe Lachy Groom; Bloomberg Beta; Founders Fund; Rethink Education; Reach Capital and Precursor Ventures. Students and professors are struggling In 2018, Oyerinde conceived the
Akash Nigam, the co-founder and CEO of leading avatar company Genies, is spearheading the adoption of ChatGPT within his organization. According to Business Insider, Nigam is spending $2,400 a month on ChatGPT Plus accounts for his 120 employees to cut costs and unlock new levels of productivity. “I’m a pretty frugal, stingy person,” Nigam told the Business Insider. “But in my mind, this is for the health and growth of the company.” By automating monotonous tasks, such as answering coding queries, creating technical roadmaps, and generating creative briefs, Nigam says
In a watershed moment for the global tech industry, more than 150 African content moderators—who have provided moderation services for AI tools used by Facebook, TikTok, and ChatGPT—have voted to unionize, TIME reports. At an event in Nairobi this week, content moderators employed by third-party outsourcing companies voted to establish the first African Content Moderators Union. A long time coming The union’s establishment is the culmination of a process that began in 2019 when former Facebook content moderator Daniel Motaung was fired after attempting to unionize workers at the outsourcing
Whether we’re talking about ChatGPT, AI lawyers or the chatbot that lets you chat with Tupac in real time – generative AI is taking the world by storm. But these systems are also reproducing many of the same biases we see in the real world – from sexist performance reviews to racist images. Leading AI ethicist Dr Timnit Gebru, known for her groundbreaking research on the risks of large language models, was forced forced out of her position as the co-head of Google’s AI ethics team after raising issues of
Kieran Snyder, co-founder and CEO of the augmented writing platform Textio, recently took a deep dive into the inner workings of ChatGPT. She soon discovered that it doesn’t take much for the OpenAI’s chatbot to sprout racist and sexist comments. So what happened? Writing for Fast Company, Snyder explained she had asked the chatbot to generate generic performance reviews for interview candidates. The chatbot was tasked with providing high-quality feedback that didn’t touch on the candidates’ personalities but more about why their work experience didn’t make them a good fit
A TIME investigation has exposed the horrendous conditions many Kenyan workers had been subject to while working under OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. OpenAI’s toxic working conditions Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI, alongside the recent announcement of the platform’s $29 billion valuation, has sparked speculation. According to a recent TIME investigation, Kenyan workers hired to moderate the platform’s content had been left ‘mentally scarred’ from the harsh working conditions they were exposed to. ChatGPT had reportedly been prone to blurting out violent, sexist, and racist remarks due to being trained
This article by Christian Ilube was first published on Medium. What is ChatGPT? Open AI is an artificial intelligence research company that aims to create AI to benefit all of humanity. In 2020, they announced GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), an AI capable of any reading/writing task e.g., question answering, summarising text, or continuing a story. It was created as a step on the way to Open AI’s grand mission of solving general intelligence, creating an AI able to learn any intellectual task that a human can do. Despite not being general intelligence, GPT-3 still has many
