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by alex_young 1253 days ago
TFA: “at the time these workers were employed the minimum wage for a receptionist in Nairobi was $1.52 per hour.”

Also, they were labeling graphic and illegal (in the US) content including child porn.

Seems like paying them around the minimum wage for a receptionist is way way too low to me.

2 comments

Folks are also pinning to the top of the range:

> The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance.

Minimum wage should never be a benchmark; if someone is paid minimum wage, their employer would pay them less if they were allowed to.

Which makes $2 a RELATIVELY better wage, however for the work - basically content filtering through the worst of the internet - there should be a higher compensation and psychological help available.

In this case, if Facebook and other online services had it available, they would have been better off reusing what they already developed for their side of content filtering. I want to believe 99% of bad content is already automatically filtered out, and anything that comes through and flagged by content moderators fed back into the systems that automate the process.