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.
Related 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. One worker told Time that reading the shocking material sometimes felt like “torture,” adding that they felt “disturbed” by the end of the week.
Open AI told Time there had been “a miscommunication” about the nature of the imagery that it asked Sama to collect, insisting that it had not asked for the most extreme imagery, and had not viewed any that it had been sent. While transformative and potentially beneficial, the technology clearly comes at a human cost, and throws up a slew of ethical questions about how companies go about developing their new technologies, and more broadly about how wealthier countries continue to farm out less desirable tasks to poorer nations for a lower financial outlay.