Jay, who earns up to $60 an hour, is an early adopter, joining Remotasks in January before OpenAI announced ChatGPT to the world. Since then, the platform has accelerated its search for specialized data labor. In January 2024, WIRED published a job ad for a U.S.-based creative writer, sports journalist, chemistry expert, and nuclear physicist, as well as someone who speaks more than 20 European languages. It revealed that.
“Generative AI is prone to hallucinations if left unchecked, and even if that is true, there are ways to improve the answers and make them more comprehensive,” Primack says. “Ultimately, we need experts to generate data that truly exceeds the limits of AI’s capabilities,” she says.
Remotasks still maintains a “large footprint of operations” in the Philippines, Primack said. But most of the company's new specialty contractors are in the United States, and many of the language posts are based in Europe, where native speakers live, she says. Primack is less forthcoming about what exactly caused this change. Was a particular Scale AI client asking for more specialized data, or was the company trying to anticipate what the next generation of AI would need? “It's a combination of both,” she says. explains that their expert staff is trained on data from many clients, not just one.
Researchers have their own theories about what the role of these experts means about the direction of the AI industry.
“Previously, most of the AI technologies we used were trained on so-called large-scale garbage dump datasets,” says the Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics Research Group at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin. says Milagros Miceli, who leads the company. OpenAI built his ChatGPT by paying Kenyan workers to scrape the internet and report harmful content. However, scraping such data has led to lawsuits from publishers and rights holders, and many prominent publishers are now blocking data collection. Miceli said he would pay an expert to provide a workaround.
“Over the last year, companies have actually created new data to avoid these types of corporate copyright infringement claims,” Miceli said. “If you hire a writer to write a story for the purpose of training a model and you pay him, you own the rights to that text. There are no more copyright issues.”
Since ChatGPT's debut, study after study has shown that college-educated people in the United States and Europe, in industries typically employed by workers previously thought to be generally safe from technological change, have Disruption is expected. Despite these concerns, the wages on offer can make it difficult for some people to turn down training that could put them out of business.
Salaries for specialist roles vary depending on expertise. Infectious disease specialists can earn up to $40 an hour with remote tasks, while historians are given $32 an hour, according to current job listings. People hired to train algorithms in a particular language tend to be paid less. The Bulgarian writer's job was advertised at $5.64 an hour, but the job listing indicated that a Finnish-speaking person could earn almost five times as much at $23 an hour.