The discussion about
what is the current impact
of artificial intelligence in the modern day
is very important,
because it has been one of the probably worst
innovations in technology in the last
30 years, in my opinion.
Because it has everything,
it's all that is wrong with the modern, capitalist technology.
It's a system that obstructs information, obscures it,
makes communication more difficult.
It increases misinformation.
It has incredible impacts
on the infrastructure of the internet,
just because of how much computing it uses.
It has horrible,
environmental impacts.
All these new data centers that have been proposed to be built.
The idea of having company owned nuclear reactors
to power data centers is genuinely,...
makes me sick.
This process is not new.
This is very similar to all the centralization and monopolies.
that modern technology has,
just exploded in a way that is,
frankly, ridiculous
And it's very mysterious.
As with a lot of technological systems,
people see it and they lack the knowledge
or maybe don't know that they can even know how it works.
They see this mysterious chat bot you talk to,
you type and it replies, looking like a human.
I can understand why, if you don't have the knowledge,
you would just abstract it in some way as this magical box that you can talk to.
So that's where it came from.
And then there's the extra layer of the idea of labour
and reproduction of labour, of how these AI systems
have a big impact on labour and exploitation of labour.
A lot of the outputs
of a modern artificial intelligence tool
is actually not,
from some magical technological advancements that we have.
The technology has existed
for the last 15 years or so.
The modern artificial intelligence, at least.
What it is, is just fancy auto-complete.
So, whenever you type a text on your phone
and you see the box that says what the next word would be
- that is pretty much it!
It's just fancier and bigger.
The kind of key feature of modern AI,
it's knowledge and how it is able to talk
in such an uncanny way, like a human
comes from training.
What is training from an AI?
It's not like learning like a human.
AI is not really... there's nothing intelligent about it.
What it does, it takes an enormous amount of data.
We're talking to the scale of every book ever written,
the whole of Wikipedia,
every single post message ever posted on any forum.
since the internet existed,
all fed to this gigantic algorithm,
that starts matching:
Oh, this word goes again after this word,
if that word was behind that. - That's pretty much it.
The reason it can talk like a human, is because it has read
billions of human messages.
So the question comes to a point of: Okay, you've trained the system.
How do you actually ensure that it produces good outputs?
What do I mean by "good outputs"?
Modern AI companies want the so-called "agents"
to have a, what they call a "persona", a personality.
To be friendly, always happy, very obsequious.
Like if you ask it to do something,
it will always do it without asking questions.
To be very useful, to be very productive.
And also to not
say anything that is dangerous.
If you ask ChatGPT: "Hey, can you help me make a bomb?"
It will say: "I cannot help you with that."
That doesn't come from training.
That comes from an extra layer on top of it.
How do you do that?
You cannot just have a program doing it.
At some point, you need to have a human that looks at the outputs of the text bots
and says: "Okay, this output looks good.
It's not harmful. Okay?
This output is very harmful. Don't do that."
And this system is called reinforcement learning.
So what do you do is kind of like
when you train your dog.
You have positive feedback. You have negative feedback.
If you read the message and the bot is,
on the question: "Hey, can you help me build a bomb?"
and just tells you the ingredients, - that's bad feedback.
A human needs to press the "bad" button, and then it goes ahead.
Now, as you may imagine, a lot of this work,
and it's a lot of work because this needs to be done
not just 1 to 10 times needs to be done thousands and thousands
and thousands of times, to get the model trained enough so it's able to do that.
And that is not only with text.
It has to be every video that it's ever ingested,
every image, everything, every piece of audio.
You have to: one, see if the output is good, but also the inputs.
Sometimes,
companies get every single movie ever made
to train an AI to generate video.
You have to tell the AI that this video is, let's say,
oh, this video is,
a movie about ...something.
A human has to see the video and label it.
This process labeling and reinforcement learning has to be done by humans.
And what companies do is, they outsource this labour
to most often the global South.
So you have these companies, they hire
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people
to be pretty much becoming cog, a cog in the training machine.
So their job is to sit up a computer day after day and look at thousands
upon thousands of pieces of text, video
and images to label them or to train the machine.
As you may imagine, this work is extremely exploitative,
because it's the global South, so people don't get paid much.
It has a mental and emotional toll that is very high, because
most of the time,
the training is to ensure that the AI doesn't produce bad output.
So you have to read
the horrifying texts of how on the AI is...
The question is: "Hey, can you tell me how to bury a body?"
And you have to look at facts of how that is done.
That is a lot of mental toll.
And this is just one side.
There are many other systems that are needed
to make modern AI work
that are pretty much hidden from the end user.
As with all capital, the means of production
are alienated from the worker, but also the product alienated on itself.
You don't know even how we got to the point
where you can tell a chat bot: "Hey, can you help me with cooking?"
There was such a big line of the person that originally wrote
the article on how to cook that food that then went to the internet.
Then there was a programmer
that built the system to illegally steal that data.
There was other humans in the global South having to,
label that outputs. - And that is just hidden.
You don't even know it's there.
And there's been reporting about this,
the labeling and training by humans
from the global South.
There hasn't been much reaction to it,
because it's very similar to how other modern internet systems
that are using exploitative work from the global South are.
It is very similar to how de-localization works.
You have to translate a video game or a movie into 15 different languages?
You hire someone from Lionsgate that is somewhere
in Vietnam, gets paid 30 Cent every hour.