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Comments (154)

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  yipinwong
  I cringe with AI "colonialism".The article states three reasons for doing so, but all of them are very cringe baity words.Low paid workers are due to local economy government doing jack to improve their wages in the first place. In China, competition is high, thus low pay (with other reasons such as real estate crashes, etc)Visualization makes sense but does not mean it's colonialism as colonialism requires forced intervention, and there is no such play here.Cool project bad political motivated wordings in the post.
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  Frieren
  > People don't even know about their fellow co-workers.This is very important. To isolate workers to make them powerless gives even more power to companies that are already very powerful.It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments.
• arjie
  People have been saying this for ages in the West, but when I was in India in the early 2000s the way I got my first domain name was by doing some kind of nonsense online job for $100 paid into a completely non-KYC'd account on Paypal or something. Western jobs pay a lot compared to what I could get there as someone totally unskilled. And I was completely aware that if the price rose to that of a Western worker they'd prefer to get the latter because there's some discount for the uncertainty of working with a foreign worker (market for lemons etc.).Personally, I much preferred having that gig rather than not having the gig. Got a lot of stuff from it. Computer hardware, domain name, etc. arjie.com is mine actually from there. I get why people go to the West and do grievance studies. It's what sells in that market and just like I was selling content generation or some rudimentary web software which it's hard to argue is all that high-value, they're selling grievance studies because that's where their skill meets the market price.I just wish it didn't, haha!
• datsci_est_2015
  Doing the hard work of mapping out the complex ways workers (labor) and corporate entities (capital) interact across national boundaries should be applauded, especially given the historical context that such relationships are highly exploitative.
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  htrp
  https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/Always a good reminder that the first batch of RLHF was outsourced Kenyan workers
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  notaigenerated
  I had to read that title several times until I saw the URL.
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  vanuatu
  surprised that this map does not include the largest 3-5 platformsMost data annotation comes from educated Western countries atp (the $2 meme is kind of old now since the industry has moved onto RL envs) where the annotators routinely earn multiple times the local median wage.
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  atleastoptimal
  These kinds of attempts at labelling global labor arbitrage as "colonialism" always seem naive. For thousands of years, capital has always sought the cheapest source of labor. Via offering cheap labor, China went from a poor country to a middle-income to wealthy country in a generation. The international exchange of currency for productivity via mutually beneficial arrangements is the means through which global GDP continues to grow exponentially. Data labelling and such is just the latest incarnation of that.Now there are many other risks of AI associated with its ability to centralize power, lead to chaotic outcomes, etc, but that is disconnected from this somewhat mundane reality of how capitalism works. It seems like many opponents of AI are focusing on the wrong things, like how data centers apparently used more water than entire cities or turned the water supply brown.
• adm4
  What do you say to... This is the "modern mechanical turk?"
• drnick1
  > I’m hoping this might start to fill in a larger picture of what AI colonialism actually looks like.This is exactly the kind of nonsense I would expect from an Ivy League senior in 2026.
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  danans
  It's interesting that in Europe the customer and the labor appear to be relatively colocated. Any theories as to why?
• dogtimeimmortal
  Traffic control and bot detection...: Browser not supported. Thanks again Cloudflare!
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  foco_tubi
  I think if a certain HN crowd doesn’t like the phrasing of “AI colonialism,” just substitute in “capitalism” and maybe it’ll sit better with your personal opinion (for better or worse).
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  __rito__
  I appreciate what the project is trying to do, but why go on radical hyperbole such as "That, Ma says, is the essence of AI colonialism — the extraction of difficult, low-paid labor from the Global South for profit in the West."?Also, do Chinese companies pay a higher rate? I have no idea. But Chinese data annotators also have to work with graphic content, I believe.The workers are made to read bad things as part of AI training process, but they are adults agreeing to work in those things in exchange of pay, and they can always quit. The "workers" are computer literate English-speaking elites with stable internet connections even in poorer countries.I have interacted with students from all over the world on different occasions. If I meet a student from India/US/China/Europe in a global research/academic/engineering forum, there is a non-trivial possibility that they are from a middle class or lower background, but when I meet, say, Africans, Bangladeshi people in the same places, they are almost always elites in their respective countries. It's not surprising, tbh.My point it, when you are working for 4-5 USD per hour from Africa, you can communicate using good English, have a decent computer, have stable internet connection, a college degree, you are doing the AI work by choice.Being paid by hours even in India is a great privilege where the culture is to make people work 10-12 hours shift for the pay of 8.They say, "$2", I don't have any direct experience, but I saw ads for $4-$5 per hour, and that is for non-specialist work, and if you get steady work, you are paid more than "engineers" with 4 year degree at the end of the month.In India, freshers Engineers in consultation shops get ₹30-40k per month, and have to be in office for 8-12 hours per day. Where 4$ per hour pay will get you 4$ * ₹95 * 8 hours per day * 5 days per week * 4 weeks per month = ₹60,800, which is enough for a comfortable middle class life (outside metros like Mumbai, Bangalore, etc.). There is also no money to be paid for rent, commute, etc.People getting into these positions are getting in by choice, and remaining by choice.If they wanted to shed light on real woes, they should have focused on the small terms the workers are hired for. And work not being regular, people laid off on short notice, short term contracts, etc.Seeing salary as well as prices in US dollars eyes is a common folly. This is what I believe is called "geo arb".
• satnhak
  OK, so all of the evil capitalist western companies entirely pull out of the global south, taking their evil dehumanising "work" with them. Then what?Maybe the lucky ones get to work as domestics or laborers in the Middle East? I'm sure that's much better than reading AI slop in your home country with their children living with them and their friends and family nearby.
• mitxela
  Is the title meant to be a pun?
• wmchen
  I would love to see more examples of systems mapping and systems thinking taught in schools and early career environments. I'm really quite fond of the related [3] Map the System [1] competition. Some excellent examples of systems maps at [2].In my bubble in undergrad, "policy case competitions" were all the rage. You're given a broad topic (often a wicked problem of some kind such as Housing Inaffordability or Climate Change, or something related to the sponsors field of interest), told to write a policy briefing note with no real constraints (money, resources, time) with recommendations to tackle the problem, and then evaluated by expert judges (typically think tankers, professors, senior government executives) who in a very well-meaning way, oftentimes have nothing significant to add or critique (because again, no constraints and they're nice because it's a learning environment), so they end up saying something along the lines of "have you looked at [vaguely related government program, non-profit initiative, etc.]? They used similar wording to your presentation."I made the case to a competition organizer that we really ought to do away with this format and switch to something more grounded in systems mapping, because I don't really feel it's reasonable to ask undergrads to propose a policy that will somehow solve a wicked problem, or even a subdomain of one, in one fell swoop. I also don't think the format really encourages much original thinking. Most of the recommendations end up being paraphrases of existing proposed solutions, with little opportunity to meaningfully interrogate why those solutions might or might not work in the first place.Systems mapping, or using a systems thinking lens, doesn't require you to propose a clear or obvious solution to something, but it does give people a chance to systematically examine problems through their own lenses. Having a student map out how they see the world, what they understand to be the root causes of a given problem, and how different actors and incentives interact could actually change some of our minds on how pervasive these problems are, where the feedback loops exist, and where changes might be most impactful. I think there's considerably more value in asking students to develop an interesting understanding of a problem that expands the domain of understanding than in asking them to come up with a superficially convincing solution to it.[1]: https://www.skollcentre.org/map-system[2]: https://www.mapthesystem.ca/2026[3]: I'm aware that Ma constructed a literal map of entity relationships and did analysis based off of that, but it's still systems mapping informed by systems thinking, and an excellent example of that.
• thewillowcat
  You're telling me they're recruiting these workers just by offering them attractive wages?!?! Disgusting.
• bethekidyouwant
  Bro, how is it hidden? I also annotate AI all day because I’m using it and I’m telling it whether it’s right or wrong we all are. That’s basically the future. a human with a bit more context than a machine guiding it. Also, this comment section is hilariously bad as is the articles framing of everything that we don’t like as colonialism.
• logicallee
  The second time I read the output I pay for, some of the words are modified to say the opposite. Is there a map of the hidden global labor powering that?
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  nekusar
  Everybody who works for money is exploited. Not if theyre exploited, but how much.And yeah, humans are being bought per hour to do AI training. Ok. Are they at least paid decently? Of course not! The surplus (work's worth - wages) is always captured by the Capitalist class.Do they have to look at horrible content? Yeah. Part of the job and the danger when dealing with use-uploaded content. Is the problem just the horrible content, or is it about pay?Also, this is regarding US AI companies according to the map. How are the Chinese doing their LLM training? Internally? Global South as well? Wherever they're doing it, is their pay better? Cause this map doesnt have anything regarding China... Or the EU either.
• coderintherye
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• erhserhdfd
  "Brown student" ... Why do we have to pull the student's race into this debate? ;-) /s
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  calvinmorrison
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  marsven_422
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• anax32
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  christkv
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  simianwords
  There's a certain elitist mindset that thinks all real value is in hard labour like farming, construction and white collar work is shown to be fake and exploitative.> To filter out disturbing images or posts, or to keep chatbots from creating such content, AI systems have to be able to recognize it. That means that data workers must view horrifying images or text passages to label that contentThis kind of work is definitely preferable to poverty, or even preferable to toiling in the farms. Its a decent job and some one has to do it and I'm glad someone who needs the money is doing it. I think it is misleading to portray this kind of job as uniquely harmful or stressful.