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Comment by jrflo | Hacker News Reader

Clickbait title, they fired contractors for using AI to label data, which defeats the purpose of labeling data in this case.

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It's not a clickbait title? Click bait has a very different meaning. The click bait title would be something like, "Open AI mysteriously fired these workers, find out why"

This title says why. The article then goes on to explain why that's a problem. Pretty straightforward.

Why exactly it is clickbaity? It makes perfect sense to me, I understand title as: people told not use AI fired for using AI - without any need for additional context. Mechanical Turk was shut down for exactly same reason, it was always a race to the bottom and using LLMs was cheaper than even third world gig workers. Verifying if task were done by humans is probably harder than doing them in the first place.

Training is far more broad than labeling

"People training OAI AI" has a colloquial meaning of "People working at OAI"

So the headline is built to imply:

"People who work for OAI got fired for using AI to do their job"

When a non-clickbait headline would be

"3rd party workers contracted to distill their human knowledge fired for using AI instead"

Not nearly as "clicky"

Just make it "contractors training..." And then it's fine?

As I see it, the distinction is between the work of designing and managing the training process, and the work of providing human training data. It's generally considered a good idea to automate the former, but there's a conceptual (information theoretical) issue with automating the latter. I don't know if it makes things more fair, but it's not quite a contractor vs FTE issue.

All data labeling is training, but not all training is data labeling. In this sense, the headline is correct, I don’t get the nitpicking.

Some people would die of dehydration if they read the headline "H2O is a chemical that often kills people".

But"People who work for OAI got fired for using AI to do their job"

That's exctly what happened

Really? It’s clickbait because it paints OpenAI as hypocritical: “look they’re marketing AI as valuable, and they won’t even let their own people use it”. When in fact the job description is to not use AI.

I did not get the hypocritical implication from the title and I don't think it's necessarily implied.

This is an odd take. There are many kinds of problems that must be solved using a different system than the first system that got the answer to ensure

1. That system isn't broken in a difficult to tell way.

2. The systems implementation is incorrect.

3. That the theory that particular implementation uses isn't incorrect.

There is nothing hypocritical at all about that.

Please reread. I am not making the claim that OpenAI is hypocritical.

I am making the claim that the article headline is clickbait because it paints OpenAI as hypocritical for firing workers for using AI to do their job, which is a mischaracterization because the whole job is to give human input.

Oh, sorry, I read it wrong.

> they fired contractors for using AI to label data

Is your objection to the word “train” in headline? Otherwise, you’re just restating the headline while calling it clickbait (which, btw, it’s not, perhaps you meant to say it is misleading, which is a different thing.)

labeling is more specific than training, and changes the implied situation.

Its the same difference between "I was arrested for having liquid in my car while driving" and "I was arrested for holding an open bottle of whiskey while driving"

Yeah, that's a pretty big difference. The people "training" OpenAI models are getting paid like pro football players, have PhDs in the field, and are the superstars of the company. The people "labeling" data are low level contractors that get paid basically nothing to read chat responses and grade them, anyone who can type can do it.

I don't know if it's deliberately misleading or if the journalist doesn't understand the difference, but the output is functionally the same.

So by using AI to label datasets, the data used to train the AI was generated by AI… and we arrive at the title of the article

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