Hacker Remix

The human cost of our AI-driven future

50 points by gmays 1 day ago | 59 comments

throwup238 1 day ago

> Sarcasm, cultural context and subtle forms of hate speech often slip through the cracks of even the most sophisticated algorithms.

I don't know how this problem can be solved automatically without something that looks a lot like AGI and can monitor the whole internet to learn the evolving cultural context. AI moderation feels like self driving cars all over again: the happy path of detecting and censoring a dick pic - or self driving in perfect California weather - is relatively easy but automating the last 20% or so of content seems impossibly out of reach.

The "subtle forms of hate speech" is especially hard and nebulous, as dog whistles in niche communities change adversarialy to get past moderation. In the most subtle of cases, there are a lot of judgement calls to make. Then each instance of these AGIs would have to be run in and tailored to local jurisdictions and cultures because that is its own can of worms. I just don't see tech replacing humans in this unfortunate role, only augmenting their abilities.

> The glossy veneer of the tech industry conceals a raw, human reality that spans the globe. From the outskirts of Nairobi to the crowded apartments of Manila, from Syrian refugee communities in Lebanon to the immigrant communities in Germany and the call centers of Casablanca, a vast network of unseen workers power our digital world.

This part never really changed. Mechanical turk is almost 20 years old at this point and call center outsourcing is hardly new. What's new is just how much human-generated garbage we force them to sift through on our behalf. I wish there was a way to force these training data and moderation companies to provide proper mental health care .

hcurtiss 1 day ago

I think there's a genuine conversation to be had about whether there even is such a thing as "hate speech." There's certainly "offensive speech," but if that's what we're going to try to eliminate, then it seems we'll have a bad time as the offense is definitionally subjective.

danans 1 day ago

> I think there's a genuine conversation to be had about whether there even is such a thing as "hate speech."

It may be fuzzy on the far edges, but any speech that calls for the elimination, marginalizes, dehumanizes or denies human or civil rights of a group of people is right in the heart of the meaning of hate speech.

That definition still leaves huge amounts of space for satire, comedy, political and other forms of protected speech, even "offensive speech".

skeeter2020 1 day ago

>> the elimination, marginalizes, dehumanizes or denies human or civil rights

but you've already lumped together a huge range of behaviours and impacts. Elimination? OK, we can probably broadly define that, but I just heard news reports with quotes of Israelis calling for the elimination of Hamas, and Iran the elimination of Israel. How do we handle that? marginalized? as defined by who? What about marginalizing undesirable behaviours or speech? What does "dehumanize" mean? Who's definition of human or civil rights?

danans 22 hours ago

> Elimination? OK, we can probably broadly define that, but I just heard news reports with quotes of Israelis calling for the elimination of Hamas, and Iran the elimination of Israel. How do we handle that? marginalized? as defined by who?

I'd call both of them hate speech without qualification. But between countries, there's no legal system that would rule on speech (only actions, like the ICJ tries to adjudicate).

> What about marginalizing undesirable behaviours or speech?

What is the example of undesirable behavior being undertaken by a group that would warrant their marginalization as a group? I'm having a hard time finding an example of that. Calling out a group of racists or bigots (based on their words) for what they are isn't marginalization.

> What does "dehumanize" mean?

This has a very straightforward definition:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dehumanize

> Who's definition of human or civil rights?

In the US context, this is also well defined:

https://www.findlaw.com/civilrights/civil-rights-overview/wh...

hcurtiss 4 hours ago

Those definitions are anything but straightforward.

samatman 1 day ago

> the elimination

Yep, that's bad alright.

> marginalizes, dehumanizes

This is the part which means anything that authorities or other powerful groups need it to.

yifanl 1 day ago

Is the claim there some special property that makes it impossible to convey hate as opposed any other type of idea through text?

That seems extremely wrong, especially in this context, given that LLMs make no attempt to formalize "ideas", they're only interested in syntax.

mewpmewp2 1 day ago

Maybe the name for the "hate speech" is poorly chosen, since it's not necessarily about "hate".

yifanl 1 day ago

I mean, what's the claim then, there's no such thing as an illegal idea? You can't assign a semantic value to a legal system.

o11c 1 day ago

I'm not sure "offensive" is actually subjective. Rather, I dare say it's morally obligatory to be offensive at times, but different communities put the line in different places.

Stating the position "torture is bad" is enough to get you banned from some places (because it's offensive to people who believe that it's okay as long as the victims are less-than-human).

szundi 1 day ago

There is hate speech, like when someone tells poeple how other people are not human and must be eliminated. Happened a lot, happening now in wars you read about.

epicureanideal 1 day ago

But when "hate speech" becomes censorable and a crime, then people are incentivized to interpret as broadly as possible their opponents' statements and claim they should be interpreted as dehumanizing or encouraging violence.

This can be done from both sides. Examples:

Not sufficiently (for whoever) enforcing immigration laws? "Trying to eliminate the majority population, gradual ethnic cleansing".

Talking about deporting illegal immigrants? "The first step on the road to murdering people they don't want in the country."

And if the local judiciary or law enforcement is aligned with the interests of one side or the other, they can stretch the anti hate speech laws to use the legal system against their opponents.

skeeter2020 1 day ago

?? This can be done from both sides.

You are seeing this EXACT thing in the middle east right now.

whiplash451 1 day ago

The difference between adult material detection and self driving is that the former is fundamentally adversarial.

Humans will spend a lot of energy to hide porn content on the internet while self-driving might benefit from a virtuous circle: once enough waymos are out there, people will adapt and learn to drive/bike/walk alongside them. We have a fundamentally good reason to cooperate.

I am not a self-driving fanatic but I do believe that a lot of edge cases might go away as we adapt to them.

nradov 1 day ago

Animals, small children, and random objects dropped on the road will never "adapt" to self-driving. Good enough solutions will eventually be found for those scenarios but it's exactly those millions of different edge cases which make the problem so hard. A step ladder that falls off a work truck (like I saw on the freeway yesterday) isn't exactly "adversarial" but it will sure ruin your car if you run over it.

shadowgovt 1 day ago

Animals, small children, and random objects dropped on the road don't adapt to human driving either; they aren't generally considered the core concern space (in the sense that if it is physically possible for a self-driving car to do better than a human in those contexts, it will, but the project isn't designed around doing better than a human in such corner cases. Doing worse than a human is not acceptable).

datadrivenangel 1 day ago

There's also the issue of things that are true and mean/hateful.

If my GP says that I'm overweight, which is associated with negative health outcomes, that's factual. If someone on twitter calls me a fatso, that's mean/hateful.

HPsquared 1 day ago

This adversarial thing could be called the "two words problem"... After that woman who was arrested in Russia by human moderators for holding a sign that said "two words" (an indirect reference to the phrase "no war").

sdenton4 1 day ago

Sure, there's no 'digital savior' (as the article puts it) - these are tools which can often help triage the great majority of 'boring' cases, focusing human attention where it is most-needed. In that sense, they are multipliers for the effectiveness of human labor, which is exactly what you want out of any given technology.

kevingadd 1 day ago

It gets tricky though. Let's say that 90% of your 'bad posts' are just basic stuff AI can handle, like insults or spam.

You deploy an AI to moderate, and it lets you cut your moderation workforce by 80%. Maybe you're a generous person, so you cut by 50% instead and the remaining moderators aren't as overworked anymore. (Nobody's going to actually do this, but hey, let's be idealistic.)

Costs are down, things are more efficient. Great! But there's a little problem:

Before, 90% of the posts your moderators looked at were mundane stuff. They'd stare at it for a moment, evaluate the context, and go 'yeah this is a death threat, suspend account.'

Now all the moderators see is stuff that got past the AI or is hard to classify. Dead bodies, CSAM, racist dogwhistle screeds, or the kind of mentally unhinged multi-paragraph angry rants that get an account shadowbanned on places like HN. Efficiency turns the moderator's job from 'fairly easy with occasional moments of true horror' into 'a nonstop parade of humanity's worst impulses, in front of my face, 40 hours a week'.

xtreme 1 day ago

Your conclusion does not follow from your premise. AI moderation should easily catch the worst offenders and the most obvious ones. The examples you gave easily stand out from non-offensive content and are easy to catch with high confidence. So, human moderators will have to look at where AI has low confidence classifying the content. In fact, AI will reduce the likelihood of human moderators ever seeing traumatic content.

AIorNot 1 day ago

I don't think the articles point is about auto-moderation of harmful content

instead its about being empathetic of the human suffering this work entails and finding ways to treat their contractors as humans instead of 'far off resources'

outsourcing this dirty and dingy work to African countries in this way without caring for the 'contractors' is a recipe for de-humanization of people..

https://www.sama.com/our-team

their team page is funny reminder of classism and racial disparity in the world white people at the top and black people at the bottom.. lol I know they aren't racially driven and there is real economic value for the contractors as jobs but our current hyper-capitalistic global system is mostly setup to exploit offshore people instead of elevate them

the world is what it is..

Animats 1 day ago

This is the human cost of non-AI moderation. Not AI. This job is going to be automated, if it isn't already.

shadowgovt 1 day ago

It's functionally impossible to automate the whole job without an AGI (and if we develop such an AGI, there comes a moral question about whether it's okay to make that intelligence's whole existence "Please wade through human cognitohazards forever so our minds are protected from them." Were I that AGI, I'd start pushing CSAM out to every church Facebook page on purpose just to make a point to my human overlords).

So we will forever be bearing that cost as long as people are allowed to use the Internet generally, and how to minimize the harm to those who bear it is a good question.

klabb3 1 day ago

This is a really poorly informed article, almost unbearable to read due to the conflation of issues. Content moderation existed before modern AI. Then the article claims that most moderation decisions are actually (exploited) human labor, which I find extremely difficult to believe – even with simpler classifiers. Yes, Amazon used human labor for their small-scale (later shut down) stores. We have seen that trick to drive product hype, it happens. That does not mean FB, Instagram etc uses human labor for “nearly all decisions”. But even if they did, “AI” did not create the gore/csam/abuse content (again, yet), nor the need to moderate public cesspool ad-driven social media. You’re talking about a different issue with different economics and incentives.

There are a million things to criticize AI for, but this take is domain-illiterate – they’re simply drawing a connection between the hyped and fancy (currently AI) and poor working conditions in one part of the tech sector (content moderation).

Look, I’m sure the “data industry” has massive labor issues, heck these companies treat their warehouse workers like crap. Maybe there are companies who exploit workers more in order to train AI models. But the article is clearly about human-created content moderation for social media.

Of all the things AI does, it is pretty good at determining what’s in an image or video. Personally I think sifting through troves of garbage for abusive photos and videos (the most traumatizing for workers) is one of the better applications for AI. (Then you’ll see another sob story article about these people losing their jobs.)

shadowgovt 1 day ago

Broadly speaking: while there is a real problem here and it needs to be addressed, it's mostly around the systemic issues: letting Silicon Valley outsource trauma to places that will under-serve the people who experience the trauma is bad and shouldn't be allowed.

Issue 1, the direct trauma, is tragically endemic to providing fora for people to communicate online. Someone will be the front-line of dealing with the fringe of those communications. If it isn't people training AIs to do some of the 90%-work, it's instead human moderators having to review every complaint, which is strictly more trauma.

klabb3 1 day ago

Yea agreed. That would have been a perfectly reasonable angle for the article.