Technology

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16103923

China's SAIC Motor Says It'll Mass-Produce Solid-State EV Batteries by 2026

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4649344

kewl

The echoes of Y2K resonate in today's AI landscape as executives flock to embrace the promise of cost reduction through outsourcing to language models.

However, history is poised to repeat itself with a similar outcome of chaos and disillusionment. The misguided belief that language models can replace the human workforce will yield hilarious yet unfortunate results.

AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry—contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do AI training work or online content moderation for companies like Meta and OpenAI published an open letter to President Biden, demanding that US tech companies stop “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers.”

A typical workday for African tech contractors, the letter says, involves “watching murder and beheadings, child abuse and rape, pornography and bestiality, often for more than 8 hours a day.” Pay is often less than $2 per hour, it says, and workers frequently end up with post-traumatic stress disorder, a well-documented issue among content moderators around the world.