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.
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.
So to start off with, youre using one example of game theory, the prisoners dilemma, as a stand in for right/wrong.
Which is so fucking many levels of insane i cant even address here.
Are you in the bay area? That seems like san francisco brand stupid.
Then you project your oversimplification onto me. Thats cool. Inspecting your intellectual lacunae is hella cool. You should try it.
I'm not. People can also co-operate to do bad things. The principle still applies.
You either screw over others for individual benefit, or co-operate for collective benefit. That collective benefit can still be bad and come at the cost of your group defecting against another. Like a nation going to war.
Or a small group in an advantaged position co-operating to enforce laws against a far larger group.
Your oversimplification is stuff like "laws bad" or "violence bad". Far more egregious imo.
At least I apply logic that can be adapted to describe multiple scenarios, instead of boiling things down to flat statements.
Sorry, forgot about nominative determinism.
Okay so a real reply if weve still got an audience:
Notice how you attack me for being both 'over simplified' and 'florid' in this thread? You need two things. The first is to defend the status quo. The second is to feel edgy transgressive and clever.
And youre just doing that with ideas you misunderstand so badly i cant even bring myself to correct you on. Youre not applying logic; youre just rationalizing.
Things are sometimes simple though. Violence indeed bad. Best avoided. Not a good thing. Youve clearly lived a very sheltered life and violence to you is just an abstraction. Youve never experienced the world so its really easy to imagine its all as flat and consequence free as your abstractions.
I want change. I thought I made that clear.
What I don't agree with, is laws being pointless. Their ideal is to use violence to reduce and prevent violence.
Human society needs that. Done well they are a net good.
"You're so wrong I can't even describe it", and you're saying I'm the one trying to be edgy?
Really convenient excuse to not actually engage.
Yes.
Yet, it can be used to do good.
And doing so is not only possible, but necessary.
Ok? Figuring someone out, even if you pull it off, doesn't invalidate their logic.
And you're picking and choosing among the things I've said. I'm not gonna repeat myself by pointing out the contradictions in these conclusions with what you should know about me.
I'm going to stop now. I'm pretty sure you're a troll at this point. You've only made less sense, as you enigmatically refuse to elaborate in favor of attempts to discredit rather than dismantle.