“Now Hiring: Sophisticated (but Part-Time) Chatbot Tutors: The Human Work of Teaching A.I. Is Getting a Lot More Complex As the Technology Improves”, 2024-04-10 ():
After her second child was born, Chelsea Becker took an unpaid, yearlong leave from her full-time job as a flight attendant. After watching a video on TikTok, she found a side hustle: training artificial intelligence models for a website called Data Annotation Tech.
For a few hours every day, Ms. Becker, 33, who lives in Schwenksville, Pa. would sit at her laptop and interact with an AI-powered chatbot. For every hour of work, she was paid $20-$40. From December to March, she made over $10,000.
…But as AI technology has become more sophisticated, so has the job of people who must painstakingly teach it. Yesterday’s photo tagger is today’s essay writer.
…Sometimes, companies look for subject matter experts. Scale AI has posted jobs for contract writers who hold master’s or doctoral degrees in Hindi and Japanese. Outlier has job listings that mention requirements like academic degrees in math, chemistry and physics.
“What really makes the AI useful to its users is the human layer of data, and that really needs to be done by smart humans and skilled humans and humans with a particular degree of expertise and a creative bent”, said Willow Primack, vice president of data operations at Scale AI. “We have been focusing on contractors, particularly within North America, as a result.”
Alynzia Fenske, a self-published fiction writer, had never interacted with an AI chatbot before hearing a lot from fellow writers who considered AI a threat. So when she came across a video on TikTok about Data Annotation Tech, part of her motivation was just to learn as much about AI as she could and see for herself whether the fears surrounding AI were warranted.
“It’s giving me a whole different view of it now that I’ve been working with it”, said Ms. Fenske, 28, who lives in Oakley, Wis. “It is comforting knowing that there are human beings behind it.” Since February, she has been aiming for 15 hours of data annotation work every week so she can support herself while pursuing a writing career.
Ese Agboh, 28, a master’s student studying computer science at the University of Arkansas, was given the task of coding projects, which paid $40–$45 an hour. She would ask the chatbot to design a motion sensor program that helps gym-goers count their repetitions, and then evaluate the computer codes written by the AI In another case, she would load a data set about grocery items to the program and ask the chatbot to design a monthly budget. Sometimes she would even evaluate other annotators’ codes, which experts said are used to ensure data quality.