Speaker 1 (00:01):
The familiar narrative is that artificial intelligence will take away human jobs. Machine learning will let cars, computers, and chatbots teach themselves, making us humans obsolete. Well, that's not very likely, and we're going to tell you why. There's a growing global army of millions toiling to make AI run smoothly. They're called humans in the loop, people sorting, labeling, and sifting reams of data to train and improve AI for companies like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. It's grunt work that needs to be done accurately, fast and to do it cheaply it's often farmed out to places like Africa. The story will continue in a moment.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
The robots or the machines, you're teaching them how to think like human and to do things like human.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
We met Naftali Wambalo in Nairobi. Kenya, one of the main hubs for this kind of work. It's a country desperate for jobs because of an unemployment rate as high as 67% among young people. So Naftali, father of two, college-educated with a degree in mathematics, was elated to finally find work in an emerging field. Artificial intelligence. You were labeling.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
I did labeling for videos and images.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Naftali and digital workers like him spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching the AI algorithms to recognize them.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
You label, let's say furniture in a house and you say, this is a TV, this is a microwave so you are teaching the AI to identify these items. And then there was one for faces of people, the color of the face. If it looks like this, this is white, if it looks like this, this is black, this is Asian. You're teaching the AI to identify them automatically.
Speaker 1 (02:11):
Humans tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI is getting smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that'll need labeling. You find these humans in the loop, not only here in Kenya, but in other countries thousands of miles from Silicon Valley. In India, the Philippines, Venezuela often countries with large low-wage populations, well-educated, but unemployed.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Honestly, it's like modern day slavery because it's cheap labor.
Speaker 1 (02:57):
Whoa, what?
Speaker 3 (02:59):
It's cheap labor.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Like modern-day slavery says Narima Wako-Ojiwa, a Kenyan civil rights activist, because big American tech companies come here and advertise the jobs as a ticket to the future. But really she says, it's exploitation.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
What we're seeing is an inequality.
Speaker 1 (03:21):
It sounds so good, an AI job. Is there any job security?
Speaker 3 (03:27):
The contracts that we see are very short-term, and I've seen people who have contracts that are monthly, some of them weekly, some of them days, which is ridiculous.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
She calls the workspaces, AI, sweatshops with computers instead of sewing machines.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
I think that we're so concerned with creating opportunities, but we're not asking are they good opportunities
Speaker 1 (03:55):
Because every year a million young people enter the job market the government has been courting tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Intel to come here promoting Kenya's reputation as the Silicon Savannah, tech-savvy and digitally connected.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
The president has been really pushing forward opportunities in AI.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
President?
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yes, our President Ruto.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Ruto?
Speaker 3 (04:22):
Yes. The president does have to create at least one million jobs a year, the minimum. So it's a very tight position to be in.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
To lure the tech giants, Ruto has been offering financial incentives on top of already lax labor laws. But the workers aren't hired directly by the big companies, they engage outsourcing firms, also mostly American, to hire for them. There's a go-between?
Speaker 3 (04:50):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
They hire, they pay.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
I mean they hire thousands of people.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
And they are protecting the Facebooks from having their names associated with this.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
We're talking about the richest companies on Earth.
Speaker 3 (05:04):
Yes, but then they're paying people peanuts.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
AI jobs don't pay much?
Speaker 3 (05:12):
They don't pay well, they do not pay Africans well enough, and the workforce is so large and desperate that they could pay whatever and have whatever working conditions and they will have someone who will pick up that job.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
So what's the average pay for these jobs?
Speaker 3 (05:29):
It's about a dollar and a half, $2 an hour.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
$2 per hour, and that is gross, before tax,
Speaker 1 (05:36):
Naftali, Nathan and Fasika were hired by an American outsourcing company called Sama that employs over 3000 workers here and hire for Meta and OpenAI. In documents we obtained OpenAI agreed to pay Sama $12 and 50 cents an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got, though Sama says that's a fair wage for the region.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
If the big tech companies are going to keep doing this business, they have to do it the right way. So it's not because you realize Kenya is a Third World country you say this job, I would normally pay $30 in the US, but because you're Kenya, $2 is enough for you. That idea has to end.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
Okay, $2 an hour-
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
… in Kenya. Is that low, medium? Is it an okay salary?
Speaker 4 (06:28):
So for me, I was living paycheck to paycheck. I have saved nothing because it's not enough.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
Is it an insult?
Speaker 5 (06:36):
It's, of course it is.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Why did you take the job?
Speaker 5 (06:41):
I have a family to feed and instead of staying home, let me just at least have something to do.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
And not only did the jobs not pay well, they were draining. They say deadlines were unrealistic, punitive with often just seconds to complete complicated labeling tasks. Did you see people who were fired just because they complained?
Speaker 4 (07:04):
Yes. We were walking on eggshells.
Speaker 1 (07:06):
They were all hired per project and say Sama kept pushing them to complete the work faster than the projects required, an allegation Sama denies. Let's say the contract for a certain job was six months. What if you finished in three months? Does the worker get paid for those extra three months?
Speaker 5 (07:30):
No.
Speaker 4 (07:30):
KFC.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
What?
Speaker 4 (07:32):
We used to get KFC and Coca-Cola,
Speaker 2 (07:34):
They used to say thank you. They gave you a bottle of soda and KFC chicken, two pieces, and that is it.
Speaker 1 (07:41):
Worse yet, workers told us that some of the projects for Meta and OpenAI were grim and caused them harm. Naftali was assigned to train AI to recognize and weed out pornography, hate speech and excessive violence, which meant sifting through the worst of the worst content online for hours on end.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
I looked at people being slaughtered, people engaging in sexual activity with animals, people abusing children, physically, sexually, people committing suicide, basically-
Speaker 1 (08:21):
All day long?
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Yes, all day long. Eight hours a day, 40 hours a week.
Speaker 1 (08:25):
The workers told us they were tricked into this work by ads like this that describe these jobs as call center agents to assist our clients' community and help resolve inquiries empathetically.
Speaker 4 (08:40):
I was told I was going to do a translation job.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Exactly what was the job you were doing?
Speaker 4 (08:45):
I was basically reviewing content, which are very graphic, very disturbing contents. I was watching dismembered bodies or drone attack victims, you name it. Whenever I talk about this, I still have flashbacks.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
Are any of you a different person than they were before you had this job?
Speaker 4 (09:10):
Yeah. I find it hard now to even have conversations with people. It's just that I find it easy to cry than to speak.
Speaker 5 (09:19):
You continue isolating yourself from people. You don't want to socialize with others. It's you and it's you alone.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Are you a different person?
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Yeah, I'm a different person. I used to enjoy my marriage, especially when it comes to bedroom fireworks, but after the job, I hate sex.
Speaker 1 (09:37):
You hated sex.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
After countless seeing those sexual activities, pornography on the job that I was doing, I hate sex.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Sama says mental health counseling was provided by "fully licensed professionals," but the workers say it was woefully inadequate.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
We want psychiatrists, we want psychologists, qualified who know exactly what we are going through and how they can help us to cope.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Trauma experts.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
Do you think the big company, Facebook, ChatGPT, do you think they know how this is affecting the workers?
Speaker 2 (10:19):
It's their job to know. It's their [inaudible 00:10:20] job to know-
Speaker 4 (10:20):
They do.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
…actually, because they're the ones providing the work.
Speaker 5 (10:22):
Absolutely.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
These three and nearly 200 other digital workers are suing Sama and Meta over unreasonable working conditions that caused psychiatric problems.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
It was proven by a psychiatrist that we are thoroughly sick. We have gone through a psychiatric evaluation just a few months ago, and it was proven that we are all sick, thoroughly sick.
Speaker 4 (10:48):
They know that we're damaged, but they don't care. We're humans just because we're black or just because we're just vulnerable for now, that doesn't give them the right to just exploit us like this.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Sama, which has terminated those projects would not agree to an on-camera interview. Meta and OpenAI told us they're committed to safe working conditions, including fair wages and access to mental health counseling. Another American AI training company facing criticism in Kenya is Scale AI, which operates a website called Remotasks. Did you all work for Remotasks or work with them?
Speaker 6 (11:31):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (11:32):
Afantis. Joan, Joy, Michael and Duncan signed up online creating an account and clicked for work remotely getting paid per task. Problem is sometimes the company just didn't pay them.
Speaker 6 (11:48):
And it gets to the day before payday, they close the account and say that you violated a policy.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
They say you violated their policy?
Speaker 6 (11:55):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
And they don't pay you for the-
Speaker 6 (11:57):
They don't.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
… work you've done? Would you say that that's almost common that you do work and you're not paid for it?
Speaker 7 (12:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
And you have no recourse, you have no way to even complain?
Speaker 7 (12:08):
There is no way.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
The company says "Any work that was done in line with our community guidelines was paid out." In March as workers started complaining publicly, Remotasks abruptly shut down in Kenya altogether. There are no labor laws here?
Speaker 3 (12:26):
Our labor law is about 20-years-old. It doesn't touch on digital labor. I do think that our labor laws need to recognize it, but not just in Kenya alone. Because what happens is when we start to push back in terms of protections of workers, a lot of these companies, they shut down and they move to a neighboring country.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
It's easy to see how you're trapped. Kenya is trapped. They need jobs so desperately that there's a fear that if you complain, if your government complained, then these companies don't have to come here.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
And that's what they throw at us all the time. And it's terrible to see just how many American companies are just doing wrong here. And it's something that they wouldn't do at home so why do it here?
Speaker 1 (13:22):
How Kenya became a global hotbed for technology.
Speaker 8 (13:26):
Kenya is the tech capital of East Africa
Speaker 1 (13:29):
At sixtyminutesovertime.com, sponsored by Pfizer.