> Are all of the LLMs trained using human labor that is sometimes exposed to extreme content?

The business process outsourcing companies labelling things for AI training are often the same outsourcing companies providing moderation services to facebook and other social media companies.

I need 100k images labelled by the type of flower shown, for my flower-identifying AI, so I contract a business that does that sort of thing.

Facebook need 100k flagged images labelled by is-it-an-isis-beheading-video to keep on top of human reviews for their moderation queues. They contract with the same business.

The outsourcing company rotates workers between tasks, so nobody has to be on isis beheading videos for a whole shift.

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s1mplicissimus 3 days ago | parent [-]

> The outsourcing company rotates workers between tasks, so nobody has to be on isis beheading videos for a whole shift.

Is that an assumption on your side, a claim made by the business, a documented process or something entirely different?

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alasarmas 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It has been documented that human image moderators exist and that some have been deeply traumatized by their work. I have zero doubts that the datasets of content and metadata created by human image moderators are being bought and sold, literally trafficking in human suffering. Can you point to a comprehensive effort by the tech majors to create a freely-licensed dataset of violent content and metadata to prevent duplication of human suffering?

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michaelt 3 days ago | parent [-]

Nobody's distributing a free dataset of child abuse, animal torture and terror beheading images, for obvious reasons.

There are some open-weights NSFW detectors [1] but even if your detector is 99.9% accurate, you still need an appeals/review mechanism. And someone's got to look at the appeals.

[1] https://github.com/yahoo/open_nsfw

	▲	mallowdram 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		All of this is so dystopian (flowers/beheadings) it makes K Dick look like a golden-age Hollywood musical. Are the engineers so unaware of the essential primate forces underneath this that cannot be sanitized from the events? You can unearth our extinction from this value dichotomy.
	▲	alasarmas 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I mean, yes, my assumption is there exists an image / video normalization algorithm that can be followed by hashing the normalized value. There’s a CSAM scanning tool that exists that I believe uses a similar approach

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michaelt 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I know for certain it's whatever you care to contract for, but rotation between tasks is common.

A lot of these suppliers provide on-demand workers - if you need 40 man-hours of work on a one-off task, they can put 8 people on it and get you results within 5 hours.

On the other hand, if you want the same workers every time, it can be arranged. If you want a fixed number of workers on an agreed-upon shift pattern, they can do that too.

Even when there is a rotation, the most undesirable tasks often pay a few bucks extra per hour, so I wouldn't be surprised if there were some people who opted to stay on the worst jobs for a full shift.

	▲	throwaway219450 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Having tried both strategies, unless your task is brain-dead simple and/or you have a way to cheaply and deterministically validate the labels, always pay to retain the team. Even if you can afford only a couple of people a month and it takes 5x as long, do it. It's much eaiser to deal with high quality data than to firefight large quantities of slop. Your annotators will get faster and more accurate over time. And don't underestimate the time it takes to review thousands of labels. Even if you get results l in 5 hours, someone has to check if it's any good. You might find that your bottleneck is the review process. Most shops can implement a QA layer for you, but not requesting it upfront is a trap for young players.