People Training OpenAI's AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI

People Training OpenAI's AI Fired for Using AI to Train the AI 404media.co

OpenAI has thousands and thousands of contractors helping improve the company's AI models. Multiple contractors have been fired for using AI to train the AI.

80 points•pier25•8 days ago•57 comments•

#ai #train #fired #using ai #openais #training #training openais #people training

57 comments

jrflo8 days ago

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

lemmetellya8 days ago

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.

Good4boothee8 days ago

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.

WarmWash8 days ago

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"

shwaj8 days ago

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.

ergl8 days ago

> 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.)

MeetingsBrowser8 days ago

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"

jrflo8 days ago

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.

dwroberts8 days ago

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

OutOfHere6 days ago

What worries me more than the use of AI is poisoning:

> 404 Media spoke to a fourth contractor who has worked on training models for various AI companies. They said they sometimes purposefully chose the worst responses because they wanted to actively sabotage the models’ training.

> “I did feel guilty about doing this kind of work at the start,” they said. “I either pay zero attention to the results and choose randomly or purposely choose the [worst] output. I’m not sure how much of a difference it actually makes since there are hundreds of other people also rating prompt results, but it does feel like I’m getting paid to make AI worse.”

jadermcs8 days ago

There's data in verifiable domains where a model can learn through the environment (e.g., math or coding), but some data is necessarily human experience. For instance, "what is the best ice cream in Malaga?" no matter how capable current AIs are they are not capable to get this information, there's no embodiment or simulation of human experience so far, if it's not in the labeled data they will just hallucinate the answer.

floydnoel7 days ago

I did this type of work for a while when I was between jobs earlier this year. Using Ai to write the evaluations was immediate criteria for being removed from the project. Seems obvious

hmokiguess8 days ago

Makes sense, they are buying distillation of human brains not their own weights.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

57 comments

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