One morning last year, Jacobus Louw set out on his daily neighborhood walk to feed the seagulls he finds along the way. Except this time, he recorded several videos of his feet and the view as he walked on the pavement. The video earned him $14, about 10 times the country’s minimum wage, or for Louw, a 27-year-old based in Cape Town, South Africa, half a week’s worth of groceries.
The video was for an “Urban Navigation” task Louw found on Kled AI, an app that pays contributors for uploading their data, such as videos and photos, to train artificial intelligence models. In a couple of weeks, Louw made $50 by uploading pictures and videos of his everyday life.
Thousands of miles away in Ranchi, India, Sahil Tigga, a 22-year-old student, regularly earns money by letting Silencio, which crowdsources audio data for AI training, access his phone’s microphone to capture ambient city noise, such as inside a restaurant or traffic at a busy junction. He also uploads recordings of his voice. Sahil travels to capture unique settings, like hotel lobbies not yet documented on Silencio’s map. He earns over $100 a month doing this, enough to cover all his food expenses.
And in Chicago, Ramelio Hill, an 18-year-old welding apprentice, made a couple hundred dollars by selling his private phone chats with friends and family to Neon Mobile, a conversational AI training platform that pays $0.50 per minute. For Hill, the calculation was simple: he figured tech companies already capture so much of his private data, so he might as well get a cut of the profit.
These gig AI trainers – who upload everything from scenes around them to photos, videos and audio of themselves – are at the frontlines of a new global data gold rush. As Silicon Valley’s hunger for high-quality, human-grade data outpaces what can be scraped from the open internet, a thriving industry of data marketplaces has emerged to bridge the gap. From Cape Town to Chicago, thousands of people are now micro-licensing their biometric identities and intimate data to train the next generation of AI.
This ends well.
Instinctively? No.
Due to learned experience and principles of game theory? Yes.
Don’t you try to find out which people will defect and which will co-operate, and act accordingly, instead of just screwing over everyone around you all the time?
Most people will co-operate as much as possible, and only retaliate if and when they are abused, and only against the individual or group that broke the chain of co-operation. This maximizes benefit in a way that far outweighs the cost.
Stop putting words in my mouth.
No i actually understand an amount of psychology and moral philosophy beyond some shit i read in a pop-sci or cold war history book so ive got a little more depth than a superficial understanding of ‘game theory’, but i do assess the people around me! The reliably bad ones are called cops and they will always do the worst thing.
More laws helps nothing. Laws are just excuses to not fix problems.
No, you’re right. Murder being illegal hasn’t saved a single life. In any country. Ever.
/S
Whatever “justice” system you’ve been witness to, must have you seriously confused if it has you thinking it is the only one that can exist.
Bad systems should be removed. But their existence does not mean good systems are not possible.
And you will never see the real picture until you ditch simplifications like “laws bad”.
Don’t confuse what is with what could be.
I think systems based on violence are bad, because i think violence is bad. Because theyre systems of violence, i do not think theres a way to be rid of them short of violence, but i think avoiding systematizing that violence minimizes the collateral harms.
I dont think murder being illegal has saved more lives than it has cost. I will not elaborate upon my ecidence, but it is from places squalid and opulent, decadent and visceral. The light it casts you in makes you look like a violent selfish child willing to kill–by proxy only, of course– to not have to consider the violence that is every calorie of sustenance to them.
Poetic. Unfortunately wordsmithing does not replace logic.
Violence is to defect.
A minority will always choose to defect, and they or their ability to do so must be removed.
This creates an incentive for co-operators to co-operate, by defecting against defectors en-masse. These are laws (or their ideal, rather). Whether you write them down and enact ceremony around them is inconsequential.
To wish for a system where all-defectors are not dealt with the only way which is effective, to defect back instead of co-operate in vain, is naive.
That you think I need to be told that that is still violence, even more so.
You call me childish, yet you make statements that so grossly simplify reality, that real discussion with you may be impossible.