[winter-day]

while I agree with the sentiment, as an Indian, I hope this doesn't happen in India. countries which typically do this mechanical turk-like work typically don't raise themselves out of poverty (esp. Philippines, Indonesia, etc.). If anyone wants a specific example, I lead an aspect of web crawling for a FAANG and then other public companies. Over the last 10 years we heavily used those offshore teams, aforementioned, to do sanity checks/labeling, etc. Now, we have initiatives with GPT APIs which perform just as well for pennies on the dollar we spent offshore - and the offshore team that's been loyal for years? They're getting cut.

[someotherperson]

That's just exploitative business.

I know companies that operate in that space and they pay incredibly well, between $20 to $50/hour.

> GPT APIs which perform just as well

That's because they were also trained by exploiting third world groups, paying about $2/hour.

The problem here isn't offering work to developing countries, the problem here is major corporations squeezing them for every cent and not allowing it to be used as a means of getting out of poverty. And that's also why the workers end up performing half-assed work by using automated classifiers and faking their credentials. It's not hard to see where this goes for both.

[winter-day]

if you don't think FAANGs (and most companies) participate in "exploitative business" you should find out how your iphone was made (hint: lots of exploited workers).

[someotherperson]

Never said it wasn't. Amazon's antics especially are well known. The point here is that data labelling itself isn't fundamentally exploitative, even when leveraging developing countries.

[Dylan16807]

> the offshore team that's been loyal for years

Why, though? I'd say outsourcing that way is a clear indicator that loyalty is not part of the picture.