Kenyan workers who helped remove harmful content on ChatGPT, OpenAI’s smart search engine that generates content based on user prompts, have filed a petition before the country’s lawmakers calling them to launch investigations on big tech outsourcing content moderation and AI work in Kenya.
The petitioners want investigations into the “nature of work, the conditions of work, and the operations” of the big techs that outsource services in Kenya through companies like Sama – which is at the heart of several litigations on alleged exploitation, union-busting, and illegal mass layoffs of content moderators.
The petition follows a Time report that detailed the pitiable remuneration of the Sama workers that made ChatGPT less toxic, and the nature of their job, which required reading and labelling graphic text, including describing scenes of murder, bestiality, and rape. The report stated that in late 2021 Sama was contracted by OpenAI to “label textual descriptions of sexual abuse, hate speech, and violence” as part of the work to build a tool (that was built into ChatGPT) to detect toxic …
