Underage workers are training AI
wired.com
wired.com
Even if the allegations of "traumatizing content" are true and not exaggerated cherry-picking, shouldn'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't exactly doing them a favor.
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.)
Second, the companies paying these children are extracting value from their labor greater than what they are paying the child laborers.
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.
Fourth, keeping labor costs as low as possible while extracting maximum value is the most rational course of action.
Fifth, and finally, it is very rational for children to seek out & undertake this work — to exchange their labor for money — given the economics of their lives.
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.
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 children.
In other words, this article, in my 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.
> Second, the companies paying these children are extracting value from their labor greater than what they are paying the child laborers.
This is always the case with employment, assuming that the employer isn't getting ripped off: when two parties make a voluntary trade, they're both getting something they value more than what they're trading away.
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> In other words, this article, in my 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.
I don't see anything that needs explaining here. Poverty is the default. For almost all of human history we were dirt poor. For almost all of agricultural history we were in a hungry, unpleasant Malthusian equilibrium.
The real miracle is that things are getting better. And a big part of why things are getting better is because it's possible for richer countries to 'exploit' cheap labor in poorer countries – and help them escape poverty by doing it. It's amusing how companies keep looking for cheap labor in different countries every few years, because the places that used to have the cheapest labor got wealthier because of those opportunities. I realize that not everybody shares my aesthetics, but personally I see this as beautiful, even if the ground-level details are a bit grungy.
I spent the time to make my comment because your original comment that it’s too easy for well-fed westerners to poo-poo the situation was well-made, and correct in certain context.
I don't know where you get this absurd idea. For many millennia we were commoning, herding, living in symbiosis with game- and fruit-bearing wildernesses, etc. It's not since the enclosure of the commons that subsistence outside employment has been made, largely, illegal.
For almost all of human history we have been wealthy and free. What we now recognize as "poverty" is induced by the holders of Capital in order to maintain a pool of vulnerable workers obliged to cater. We use military might and policing to undermine economic and political power in the colonies, ensuring we they remain desperate enough to take a bad deal. This isn't free market economics, this is blackmail, extortion, racketeering.
If you want to zoom in on a single example and say, "ah, well, this youngster found a pretty flower and smelled it, how can you begrudge him a sniff?" while ignoring the churning, smoke-filled skies above, I suppose it will help you sleep at night, but I'm not fooled.
Poverty is a mugging.
And I wouldn't in a thousand years want to have a quality of life as low as we had back then.
Are we on reddit?
In this case, if a child is working they're not learning or playing with others, and they're potentially being traumatized if the articles claims are to be believed. This has a long term effect on their well being, and produces a sort of negative externality.
Is it the case that we shouldn't allow this? I'm not sure, since in the long run maybe I'd rather be nourished than innocent, but its probably reasonable to argue that there could be more oversight in terms of what content they're reviewing or how much they're paid to make it a better deal for them.
Given its perfectly fine for teenagers (not children) to take part time work here and many of us here had to earn extra money before becoming adults or to help save up for education. I don't see the problem. My part time job bought me my own computer, that I used to start the career I'm in now. If you want me to believe they're more exploited than I was at my part time job at McDonald's of which was also of great benefit to me, you're nuts.
This article tries to make this is somehow exploitative. This would be a great part time job here, it just pays the rate there, and its normal to pay kids less than adults anyway since its assumed their living costs are mostly covered by parents (a living wage is unnecessary) and their inexperience and unreliability makes its so if you're going to pay full rate you're better off with an adult.
If the kids were doing to to make money for the latest Playstation, this would be fine here. I'm not seeing an issue going off what's in the article, if anything it seems like a huge boon considering what other jobs are likely available to teenage workers.
>“It’s digital slavery,” says Hassan.
It's only slavery if you're not allowed to leave, if its a bad deal, the wages aren't worth your time and effort, then don't do it. Go work in a blacksmith shop or something else they do in Pakistan that's somehow accepted but far more hazardous.
The whole article is framed in a completely champagne social justice lense and not what's practical or what works or is to a mutual benefit for both parties. If demand for those jobs has gone up and this depresses wages, that's how it works here.
From the article:
> He found that an hour’s labor would earn him around $1 to $2, he says, more than the national minimum wage, which was about $0.26 at the time.
The kid was probably making more than many adult workers.
Also from the article
> Platforms require that workers be over 18, but Hassan simply entered a relative’s details and used a corresponding payment method to bypass the checks—and he wasn’t alone in doing so.
The article makes it look like the platform was taking willingly taking advantage of underage labor, but it was the kid that was pretending to be an adult because, again, that was a job that was paying 2-3 times more than other regular job in that country.
Indeed, and the “why” of that economic reality is worth thinking about.
Should these children be denied this deal because their "material conditions" aren't currently ideal? How long should they have to be denied opportunities for their material conditions to be improved? Why does your interest in their material condition outweigh their interest in having a good income right now?
“Outweigh”? I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
No one is extracting nothing, the western company find more value in the labeling than what they are paying, to you that value is probably 0, for the 15 year old, he finds more value in the money than in the time it takes him to label the content, to you who probably writes from a 2.5k mac that time is wasted for such low amount of money.
I wish more people from poorest countries could join the workforce of the western companies, no doubt.
Look at China, massive growth from the bottom producing for the west.
Is easy to think that what we have is the norm and that everyone should be pay like a swe in s.f, look back at history, humanity is advancing so fast.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality
Child mortality went from 27% in 1950 to 4.3% in 2020.
So please, stop with the narrative that the west is a shit system, you live better than any king who lived before the 1900.
Well, this is just objectively not true.
As for the rest of your comment, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
But that's also where some of the poorest people live! You know, the people who would benefit the most from having jobs like this.
>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.
It is! In the 90s senator Tom Harkin proposed the Child Labor Deterrence Act:
>According to Harkin's website, "This bill would prohibit the importation of products that have been produced by child labor, and included civil and criminal penalties for violators."
This was a bill that never got anywhere, but simply talking about it had this impact:
>In 1993 employers in Bangladesh' ready-made garment (RMG) industry dismissed 50,000 children (c. 75 percent of child workers in the textile industry) out of fear of economic reprisals of the imminent passage of the Child Labor Deterrence Act.
>UNICEF sent a team of investigators into Bangladesh to learn what came of the children who were dismissed from their factory jobs. UNICEF's 1997 State of the World's Children report confirmed that most of the children found themselves in much more deplorable situations, such as crushing stones, scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Many of the girls eventually ended up in prostitution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_Labor_Deterrence_Act
Things might be different nowadays, but people from poor countries don't have as many opportunities. Taking some away, might be taking all they have.
Unfortunately people are more motivated by optics and their sense of embarrassment than the interest of children worldwide. A lot of the people who also pass laws around this sort of stuff grew up middle-upper class at worst and simply can't understand why these children aren't spending their free time travelling around with their youth groups and sports teams and going on vacation and presume they just don't have enough time due to all this child labour.
No, it's enticing to EVERYONE. FTA:
"A friend put him on to the site, which promised work anytime, from anywhere. He found that an hour’s labor would earn him around $1 to $2, he says, more than the national minimum wage, which was about $0.26 at the time."
Also,
"At 17, most of Younis Hamdeen’s friends were waiting tables. But the Pakistani teen opted to join UHRS via Appen instead, using the platform for three or four hours a day, alongside high school, earning up to $100 a month."
And many adults are working there:
"The sharing of a single account within family units is another way minors access the work, says Posada. He found that in some Venezuelan homes, when parents cook or run errands, children log on to complete tasks."
I'm shocked, shocked that people want to earn good money from the comfort of their home!
> In other words, this article, in my 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.
First, you tried to backtrack your use of "exploitation" here, which is clearly negative.
Second, these companies are HELPING the folks in these poor countries, paying them above the minimum wage (sometimes above the prevailing wage) for work which is less taxing and/or dangerous than the alternative.
Finally, these companies didn't create the system, but they've found WILLING workers (mostly adults) and are engaged in mutually beneficial exchange.
You just randomly threw in the word exploitation again.
They're aren't being exploited. Wages are different across the world because of cost of living & PPP.
As the article stated, a child can earn 4 times the national minimum wage. That's not exploitation. They're much better off.
Expecting every American company to pay American wages for workers in Pakistan would hurt people in Pakistan as it completely eliminates the incentive for companies to send jobs there.
> 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
The reason why is because Western countries embraced market-based economies whereas India, China, South America, etc. spent decades embracing socialism/communism and threw away decades of potential growth/prosperity.
A very interesting experiment is to look at North Korea and South Korea. In the 1950s, both countries were identical. One went the market-based route and allied with the West. The other went the communist-route and allied with China.
You can also look at the "Asian Tiger Economies". Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. They all embraced market-based economies and and their economies exploded with prosperity.
There's tons of research into why some countries prosper and some don't.
Are you sure this labor pool isn’t being exploited?
Applying the second definition to the labor market would mean every worker is being exploited, because no profit-seeking corporation (or resource efficient government program) would keep a workforce that is a net loss to the organization.
No, it means the labor side of the labor market is being exploited by capital. It means the capital side of the labor market is being exploited by labor. And yeah, that’s an accurate and correct use of “exploit.”
When you're referring to two people, then exploited always refers to definition 1.
Have you ever heard anyone say "I exploited my employee" in a context where they're referring to definition 2?
If you're talking about mineral deposits or something, then sure... you can apply definition 2. "The company exploited the ore's rich iron deposits".
Your contention that “exploitation” can’t refer to labor is a political construction, not a rational one.
Indeed, so what?
India is one of the most neoliberal countries in the world. Meanwhile China is much further ahead. The growth that China has experienced in the past few years exceeds the total economic output of India. Enjoy writing more comments in bad faith
Maybe read up a bit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind...
But we don't live in a just world, so until we do, denying them opportunities over "ethics" is condemning them to worse treatment elsewhere-- or starvation.
Hungry people don't care about the opinions of fat academics pontificating about Ethics.
It is problems of Empire, how to transmit $2USD to the edges while pulling the real control to the center. young workers in dire conditions are generally docile and replaceable, right?
As for giving people agency over their working conditions… I don't know — every so often there's an argument about prostitution, where people argue against it because it'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's a similar debate like nobody learned anything.
This sums up online discussions for 30+ years.
While some folks never learn, there's also a steady stream of new folks who weren't part of the previous conversations and _will_ learn if given the opportunity. (This is the positive side of the Eternal September.)
The fact that this labor is being offloaded to third-world kids who know how to steal their parents ID to earn beer money^W^W0.69 bobux is also a scandal, but it's the boring, frustratingly mundane kind that is common to all "gig economy" companies. Surely, not every kid is being permanently damaged by this exploitation, and there's certainly worse exploitation out there, but it's still exploitation. And these AI models aren't AI, they're products of lots of human labeling and filtering.
[0] e.g. reward modeling
I'm absolutely astounded that anyone is framing the concept of taking advantage of the vulnerable and exposing them to this kind of material for such meager pay as an opportunity for them.
This is slave labor and exploitation, regardless of whether or not the person in question is or is not a child by legal classification and whether or not the pay is above average for someone in their situation.
It makes me sick to my stomach that we are once again achieving "progress" at the expense of vulnerable people.
Should they take a 60% pay cut to do back-breaking labor at a construction site? Take a bigger pay cut to wash dishes at a restaurant? Or perhaps they could work long hours subsistence farming; that's a pretty common option in Pakistan, if the numbers I'm seeing are at all accurate. I know people who used to do this, and from what I hear it kind of sucks.
Taking distasteful options away from poor people because they might choose those options is one of my least-favorite forms of moral grandstanding, because it hurts people who already have it rough.
We can split hairs and debate semantics but that definition fits my use of the phrase.
I am not judging anyone doing the work. I’m judging the companies providing the “distasteful” options.
To restate my actual argument, since you haven't really responded to it: what work would you have very poor people do instead? There are other options, but are those options actually better? And how would you or I know?
It seems a little insulting to presume that you know their lives and their employment options better than they do, and should choose in their stead. But that's exactly what people are doing when they put public pressure on these companies to withdraw unseemly-looking options.
I don't know if a job or product exists that, somewhere down the value chain totem pole, doesn't at some point rely on employers exploiting the threat of poverty to collect value from people.
In terms of employment, I would have anyone do the best they can to provide for their families. And it’s also a damn shame that the best option the people in question have is to label explicit content for AI for a dollar or two an hour at best.
I agree with you that providing an alternative should be part of the conversation and ultimate solution but providing an alternative is not a prerequisite to assert that something is unethical.
You talk about options like they have them. The main figure in the article said that they felt like it was digital servitude but a necessity. He’s not sitting down with a financial advisor to weigh his options and then deciding filtering smut for our AI overlords is a fiscally responsible decision.
It's entirely possible that actual slaves are forced to do this work, but the conditions in the article aren't slavery.
The difference is important: we should avoid diluting the meaning of slavery, because slavery does exist and needs to be called out as effectively as possible.
“The nature of the work often feels like digital servitude—but it's a necessity for earning a livelihood.”
I interpreted your use of the phrase “slave labor” as a euphemism for something like exploitative work as opposed to forced/coercive labor. This distinction matters, as well as the cultural differences between what sort of content is jarring to encounter in the US versus the regions listed in the article.
On the other hand however, these youngsters need to pursue other options. In the case of the gentleman who saved $70 for a date, even, adjust their priorities.
“The nature of the work often feels like digital servitude—but it's a necessity for earning a livelihood.”
> I see what you’re saying but even taking cultural differences into account I can’t imagine people from the regions listed in the article aren’t at least on some level unsettled by earning a dollar an hour to read accounts of rape and label porn for AI.
I agree. I'd go as far as to say with confidence that many of them are unsettled by these things, if my impression of Pakistani or Southeast Asian culture is at all accurate. On the contrary, I could surely imagine a considerable amount of people in other cultures being less unsettled by what's described in the article.
This story happens to touch on the intersections of certain cultural, socioeconomic and moral elements. I wish a different publication reported on it.
The opportunity exists only because this labor pool is composed of laborers who are vulnerable to such exploitation.
To me, this article isn’t about whether it’s good or bad for the laborers involved, but an invitation to look at the bigger economic picture, i.e. why their material conditions are such that there are opportunities for children to trade $2 for an hour of their labor.
This person doesn't read as "insincere" to me at all. To me, they read as very deliberately and conscientiously conceding shared language and norms where possible, while also holding--and expressing!--a position on the edges of, if not beyond, this forum's Overton Window.
I find myself doing the same thing, often. It's a necessary component of discussing--with strangers--broad, complex and controversial subjects. The alternative is to simply agree, or to simply disagree--and with no understanding of how one's own beliefs relate to another's!--neither of which help us grow as a society.
> obviously judgmental language like “vulnerable”
I consider children to be a vulnerable population regardless of what the economics of their lives are like. So therefore, I judge the systems in the world that incentivize capitalizing upon that vulnerability. QED.
Completely foregoing school to make more than average might be the wrong decision for someone who is 15 or it might completely change that family’s life. Balance would be great.
That is not underage work in Pakistan! "Respected" jurnalists should bother to do minimal research! I wish I had similar gig, instead of working for 50 cents/hour at building site!
> Article 11.3 of the Constitution of Pakistan says " No child below the age of fourteen years shall be engaged in any factory or mine or any other hazardous employment.
https://paycheck.pk/labour-laws/fair-treatment/minors-and-yo...
> Hassan recalls moderating content while under 18 on UHRS that, he says, continues to weigh on his mental health. He says the content was explicit: accounts of rape incidents, lifted from articles quoting court records; hate speech from social media posts; descriptions of murders from articles; sexualized images of minors; naked images of adult women; adult videos of women and girls from YouTube and TikTok.
A 15 year old doing computer work is neither.
That's just your own unrelated gloss on the article.
Is this the greatest of title or word choice? Probably not. It's not particularly hard to figure out what it intends to say.
They may not be underage to work in construction, but they are technically "underage" for the company requirements.
There are some dangerous jobs out there, and I can perhaps accept the argument that most 15 year olds don't have the agency to sign up for that - although as a matter of practicality, having grown up poor, I know a lot of people who ended up better off working the kinds of jobs that journalists and the regulators now frown upon.
You can make abstract arguments about how in a post-scarcity utopia, no person should ever have to work. But we're not there now and you don't get there by preventing people from working before that vision of a 3D-printed, AI-based future can be realized.
For now, work is inevitable for most; so what's wrong about being paid a living wage for classifying content in front of your computer on your own schedule? As a teenager, I'd have loved that. And I was exposed to content far more vile than anything this gig could've thrown at me.
I would argue that either A) developed nations _are_ post-scarcity or B) it's impossible for a society to ever reach post-scarcity.
If we strip away all the "necessities" we've added over the past 100, 50, 20 years, and instead focus on what we've long considered basic necessities (food, shelter, clothing), then developed nations are post-scarcity because everyone has access to those necessities -- even someone "homeless" in the US has access to shelter in a real building, though it's only the minimum.
If we say that the "necessities" we've added are genuine necessities, then how can we ever reach post-scarcity if we're able to continually redefine what are necessities?
In either case, we should focus less on scarcity of "necessities" and more on absolute poverty, which leads to:
> you don't get there by preventing people from working before that vision of a 3D-printed, AI-based future can be realized.
Abject poverty is the norm, and nations became "developed" through brutal labor, including child labor. We shouldn't be telling people to stay poor because we don't like their working conditions.
The notion that “work” is bad has got to go.