while I agree with the sentiment, as an Indian, I hope this doesn't happen in India. countries which typically do this mechanical turk-like work typically don't raise themselves out of poverty (esp. Philippines, Indonesia, etc.). If anyone wants a specific example, I lead an aspect of web crawling for a FAANG and then other public companies. Over the last 10 years we heavily used those offshore teams, aforementioned, to do sanity checks/labeling, etc. Now, we have initiatives with GPT APIs which perform just as well for pennies on the dollar we spent offshore - and the offshore team that's been loyal for years? They're getting cut.
I know companies that operate in that space and they pay incredibly well, between $20 to $50/hour.
> GPT APIs which perform just as well
That's because they were also trained by exploiting third world groups, paying about $2/hour.
The problem here isn't offering work to developing countries, the problem here is major corporations squeezing them for every cent and not allowing it to be used as a means of getting out of poverty. And that's also why the workers end up performing half-assed work by using automated classifiers and faking their credentials. It's not hard to see where this goes for both.
if you don't think FAANGs (and most companies) participate in "exploitative business" you should find out how your iphone was made (hint: lots of exploited workers).
Never said it wasn't. Amazon's antics especially are well known. The point here is that data labelling itself isn't fundamentally exploitative, even when leveraging developing countries.
