A Kenyan has told you that this job pays substantially better than average and that they wish more companies would make such jobs available, and your response is "no, you're wrong, this job pays too little". On what basis do you make that claim? What makes you better qualified than OP to comment on conditions in Kenya?
You could apply your logic to sweatshop scenarios where the people in those countries are just happy to have work, even if the work pays unfair wages, requires unreasonable hours, uses child labor, and provides no benefits to the workers. But hey... the disenfranchised are just happy to have a paycheck right?
If we insist upon that, then why hire in Kenya, which is an unstable and unpredictable environment that has a lot of inherent risks for the company?
Or are you arguing these jobs shouldn't exist at all?
For ChatGPT related, yes/maybe. But for other content filetering work, it's primarily video & pictures: https://www.wired.com/story/social-enterprise-technology-afr...
Can you get there without that? Likely not.
What you’re suggesting is to actually keep them poor for their own good. It’s a nonsensical and counterproductive argument that your making.
You can chop logic on this all day long if you like, but the point is, this work is terrible and damaging, and that's why we farm it out to countries like Kenya where the people there don't have a choice.
The set of choices for people earning $2/day is different than $20 or $200, but not smaller.
Your aggression is better targeted towards manufacturing jobs in parts of Asia, or Walmart workers in the rural US, than to this context.
I think this kind of moral puritanism is an enemy of real social progress. Maybe we shouldn't or can't expect some supreme, pure state of "ethical", maybe all we can or should expect is "better".
Instead of having this elaborate, inefficient system of funnelling money to first world billionaires and then having them (maybe) send some of it back to the developing world, wouldn't it be better if these workers were just paid better in the first place?
There is overhead to sending jobs to poor, unstable countries in timezones far from headquarters. If we insist that everyone, worldwide should be paid the same wages we are in the US, what incentive do companies have for not just hiring locally and avoiding those costs? If we step it back and say "okay, you should at least pay what you would in India", then why not just hire in India, which is a far more predictable environment than Kenya?
But it does not take away from the fact that it can negatively affect the employees in an adverse way long term, and takes advantage of poor people to give them an objectively bad deal based on an information asymmetry where the person in question might not know that they have to read graphic descriptions of bestiality and pedophilia.
Scarred for life by reading/labeling text? There is obviously a big difference between labelling pictures or video and text. I would be open to seeing an actually study, but my prior would be that text must be harmless. I would certainly be open to reading any text, especially if the context is that the text is for training purposes.
Sama/source in trouble yet again!
> I only assume that one Kenyan is more representative than one westerner. I'd happily invite other Kenyans to comment their own perspective!