The article states three reasons for doing so, but all of them are very cringe baity words.
Low paid workers are due to local economy government doing jack to improve their wages in the first place. In China, competition is high, thus low pay (with other reasons such as real estate crashes, etc)
Visualization makes sense but does not mean it's colonialism as colonialism requires forced intervention, and there is no such play here.
Cool project bad political motivated wordings in the post.
Jeez. The outrage-bait is dripping off of this sentence. Paying above the prevailing wage in a town for simple computer work, adding money to the local economy = extracting low-wage labor. It’s phrased like it’s sticking a syringe into Bangladesh and stealing their blood.
It initially got an eye roll our of me, but it looks like the term that's been thrown around increasingly, and not entirely without cause. If the patterns, parallels, and impacts are close enough to make the comparison valid then it might be a more reasonable term than I expected. Colonialism doesn't necessarily require forced intervention or conquest. There are several definitions, but one would be the domination/exploitation of a people to serve a foreign power. By driving down wages, data harvesting through surveillance, and stealing natural resources tech companies are just as capable of exploiting and plundering as governments have been.
Looking at the general definition of colonialism... .. .
Whether it's colonialism, economic arbritrage.. if this is so bad, happy to learn other options.
Then that's not colonialism, it's just serfdom. Colonialism implies a foreign nation, but most countries workers are poor due to their own politicians and business leaders squeezing them for their own interest.
Sure, powers like the US and others still exact colonial-like force over smaller and weaker countries, for economic gain, but if the US would retreat from that colonial position tomorrow, the workers in those countries would not suddenly get higher wages, they'd just get more oppression from their own local robber barons, as it happened in every colonized country after the colonizers left.
But if you wanna grow the scope, we can say that we're all serfs of usury by the international banking system which runs on getting us addicted to debt which we and future generations are forced to pay off without being asked if we agree with it, which can be seen as a foreign imposed colonial power in a way, since no modern country can trade and operate without being part of it, whether they want to or not.
that's definitionally colonilism under imperialism.
"but if the US would retreat from that colonial position tomorrow, the workers in those countries would not suddenly get higher wages, they'd just get more oppression from their own local robber barons, as it happened in every colonized country after the colonizers left."
not true, when colonizers leave of their "own volition", it's usually with a puppet government left behind called "friendly" that's essentially a proxy for colonial extraction. Nations that kick out the foreign influence under libertaory action often are sanctioned or invaded to try and topple them and revert to depedance on western intervention, but, when they succeed, rights and success often are much increased for the people in them, see "Human Rights in the USSR" by albert syzmenski, who uses only western sources for the book to steelman his position.
The western dependence happens through layers of coordinated and planned proxy vasselization. See the books "Unequal exchange" by Arghiri Emmanuel and "superimperilaism" by michael hudson for more details and scientific treatments of the question. "Inventing Reality" by Micheal Parenti might be another good read for you!
"But if you wanna grow the scope, we can say that we're all serfs of usury by the international banking system which runs on getting us addicted to debt which we and future generations are forced to pay off without being asked if we agree with it,"
Glad that one of the other sibling comments looked this quote up so I didn't have to. Fully "growing the scope:"
> For capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism, and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with undeveloped and underdeveloped economies. In turn, that financial behaviour divides the world among monopolist business companies. In colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government will engage in geopolitical conflict over the exploitation of labour of most of the population of the world.
> Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies to exploit labour and natural resources, and the exportation of finance capital, rather than manufactured goods, to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of imperialism.
> Moreover, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike) and placate the working class.
-- "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
"Then that's not colonialism, it's just serfdom. Colonialism implies a foreign nation, but most countries workers are poor due to their own politicians and business leaders squeezing them for their own interest."
This distinction collapses under the scientific understandings of imperialism and colonialism, linked above in more detail.
According to who?
Can I recommend a work by a certain Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, that was concerned with this exact mechanism and described it in detail?
Let me know if any of this sounds at all relevant to the situation we find ourselves in:
> For capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism, and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with undeveloped and underdeveloped economies. In turn, that financial behaviour divides the world among monopolist business companies. In colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government will engage in geopolitical conflict over the exploitation of labour of most of the population of the world.
> Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies to exploit labour and natural resources, and the exportation of finance capital, rather than manufactured goods, to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of imperialism.
> Moreover, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strike) and placate the working class.
This was Wikipedia's tl; dr of "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism"
Here's more if that sounded elucidating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage...
Of course, academia then engineers those very moral values in order to pre-sell this moral impact. And since the academy has been constructed as the ethical handmaiden of liberalism -- inventing its political and ethical legitimacy, training its elite -- the language of its moral outrage and impact is that of contemporary liberalism.
This is very important. To isolate workers to make them powerless gives even more power to companies that are already very powerful.
It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments.
It was always employees who resisted it the most. Most wanted to stay in their lane and limit their social circles to a few coworkers they liked.
> It also makes to work in this industries more isolating and will cause more mental health issues. This should be illegal, and probably is, and should be investigated and punished by goverments
I can't actually tell what you're talking about or what you want to be illegal.
In recent years the biggest complaint online is that companies have been forcing employees back to the office so they can be less isolated. If companies were conspiring to isolate coworkers from each other as much as possible, return to office is the last thing you would expect to see.
Really depends. These are people in the same social class. But I have never seen a cleaning lady that works as a contractor being invited to a corporate party event.
They're forcing employees back to office so they can have more control.
> The companies were always trying to get coworkers together
Sure, get together for "team building" to increase productivity. Just don't do anything problematic like discuss your salary or benefits with any of your coworkers.
I work fully remote, by necessity. But it’s not better. I’m less in touch with everything going on inside and outside my teams, than I was when I was in-office 9-5.
This is because data annotation platforms have very low lock in and workers jump between them opportunistically, so they want to rely on as many (small) network effects as possible
It's preemptive union busting.
https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
Always a good reminder that the first batch of RLHF was outsourced Kenyan workers
Most data annotation comes from educated Western countries atp (the $2 meme is kind of old now since the industry has moved onto RL envs) where the annotators routinely earn multiple times the local median wage.
Maybe the lucky ones get to work as domestics or laborers in the Middle East? I'm sure that's much better than reading AI slop in your home country with their children living with them and their friends and family nearby.
Also, do Chinese companies pay a higher rate? I have no idea. But Chinese data annotators also have to work with graphic content, I believe.
The workers are made to read bad things as part of AI training process, but they are adults agreeing to work in those things in exchange of pay, and they can always quit. The "workers" are computer literate English-speaking elites with stable internet connections even in poorer countries.
I have interacted with students from all over the world on different occasions. If I meet a student from India/US/China/Europe in a global research/academic/engineering forum, there is a non-trivial possibility that they are from a middle class or lower background, but when I meet, say, Africans, Bangladeshi people in the same places, they are almost always elites in their respective countries. It's not surprising, tbh.
My point it, when you are working for 4-5 USD per hour from Africa, you can communicate using good English, have a decent computer, have stable internet connection, a college degree, you are doing the AI work by choice.
Being paid by hours even in India is a great privilege where the culture is to make people work 10-12 hours shift for the pay of 8.
They say, "$2", I don't have any direct experience, but I saw ads for $4-$5 per hour, and that is for non-specialist work, and if you get steady work, you are paid more than "engineers" with 4 year degree at the end of the month.
In India, freshers Engineers in consultation shops get ₹30-40k per month, and have to be in office for 8-12 hours per day. Where 4$ per hour pay will get you 4$ * ₹95 * 8 hours per day * 5 days per week * 4 weeks per month = ₹60,800, which is enough for a comfortable middle class life (outside metros like Mumbai, Bangalore, etc.). There is also no money to be paid for rent, commute, etc.
People getting into these positions are getting in by choice, and remaining by choice.
If they wanted to shed light on real woes, they should have focused on the small terms the workers are hired for. And work not being regular, people laid off on short notice, short term contracts, etc.
Seeing salary as well as prices in US dollars eyes is a common folly. This is what I believe is called "geo arb".
In my bubble in undergrad, "policy case competitions" were all the rage. You're given a broad topic (often a wicked problem of some kind such as Housing Inaffordability or Climate Change, or something related to the sponsors field of interest), told to write a policy briefing note with no real constraints (money, resources, time) with recommendations to tackle the problem, and then evaluated by expert judges (typically think tankers, professors, senior government executives) who in a very well-meaning way, oftentimes have nothing significant to add or critique (because again, no constraints and they're nice because it's a learning environment), so they end up saying something along the lines of "have you looked at [vaguely related government program, non-profit initiative, etc.]? They used similar wording to your presentation."
I made the case to a competition organizer that we really ought to do away with this format and switch to something more grounded in systems mapping, because I don't really feel it's reasonable to ask undergrads to propose a policy that will somehow solve a wicked problem, or even a subdomain of one, in one fell swoop. I also don't think the format really encourages much original thinking. Most of the recommendations end up being paraphrases of existing proposed solutions, with little opportunity to meaningfully interrogate why those solutions might or might not work in the first place.
Systems mapping, or using a systems thinking lens, doesn't require you to propose a clear or obvious solution to something, but it does give people a chance to systematically examine problems through their own lenses. Having a student map out how they see the world, what they understand to be the root causes of a given problem, and how different actors and incentives interact could actually change some of our minds on how pervasive these problems are, where the feedback loops exist, and where changes might be most impactful. I think there's considerably more value in asking students to develop an interesting understanding of a problem that expands the domain of understanding than in asking them to come up with a superficially convincing solution to it.
[1]: https://www.skollcentre.org/map-system
[2]: https://www.mapthesystem.ca/2026
[3]: I'm aware that Ma constructed a literal map of entity relationships and did analysis based off of that, but it's still systems mapping informed by systems thinking, and an excellent example of that.
Their local environments are being destroyed, city and state governance corrupted, regular jobs muscled out, electricity used exorbitantly, psyches damaged, and so much more all in the name of extracting low-cost labor from the less privileged — and thus readily exploited — halfway across the globe, but sure, definitely not colonialism.
Colonialism doesn't mean you make people do back-breaking manual labor; it means you exploit people far away to extract capital from where they are so people nearby can enjoy the fruits of others without having to do the work themselves.
To the extent these claims are true (and I'm sure that varies by location), those are the primary problems, not the fact that people are being offered jobs they seem to prefer to other jobs.
- I would say that extracting capital from labor does not constitute "slavery" in the sense of either de facto or de jure "ownership" of humans, but a wider interpretation of the word may apply.
- Exploitation doesn't have to be fraud. People can be willingly exploited. If we imagine for the sake of argument that human suffering can be quantified, and we imagine a person who starts from a place of, say, a 10 on an arbitrary scale where that's pretty bad (and 0 is no suffering), they may "choose" to take a job that reduces their suffering to an 8. Despite the reduction in suffering, someone else benefits from this arrangement more than the suffering human, and the benefited person could have chosen to reduce the suffering further but for the increase of their profit. This is still exploitation, even if the sufferer was made aware of all the circumstances up front.
- I said that the people's psyches were damaged; nothing about "psychic damage". One example of damage to the psyche is being asked to classify images of CSAM for eight hours a day. Regardless of the pay, this causes damage to people with even the barest shred of empathy.
[0] I might point you to Karen Hao's "Empire of AI". Leaving aside the author's intent, there are some chapters in the latter parts of the book replete with references to such events.
Definition: Colonialism is the practice by which a state or power extends and maintains political, social, economic, and cultural domination over a foreign territory and its people.
So yes, at scale, a rich country (political domination) employing people en masse in the developing world (economic domination), in this case showing them a slideshow of all the objectionable content westerners share, is colonialism.
The fact that it even exists as an option to simply "export" undesirable tasks to people overseas that you don't see and don't care about is itself an extension of and the maintenance of colonialism.
It's also worth noting that so, so, so much of our trade right now is anything but. Exporting ships for wrecking in India, the entire fast-fashion industry, chocolate, coffee, lithium mining, so many industries are absolutely hip-deep in the abusive nature of colonialism. Data labeling/moderation are just the most recent iterations of the same shameful tradition.
I don’t know why academics think that uttering the right words will actually change anything, they’re not Gandalf.
To be fair, that's pretty explicitly what the organisation hosting it is all about.
And yeah, humans are being bought per hour to do AI training. Ok. Are they at least paid decently? Of course not! The surplus (work's worth - wages) is always captured by the Capitalist class.
Do they have to look at horrible content? Yeah. Part of the job and the danger when dealing with use-uploaded content. Is the problem just the horrible content, or is it about pay?
Also, this is regarding US AI companies according to the map. How are the Chinese doing their LLM training? Internally? Global South as well? Wherever they're doing it, is their pay better? Cause this map doesnt have anything regarding China... Or the EU either.
There are many problems with modern capitalism and the political economy of the world. If you have ideas about how we can build a better system, I genuinely wish you luck.
"Voluntary" is not a word I would use to describe any agreement where one side is choosing between the deal and physical danger or potential death.
It's mutually beneficial (otherwise one party or the other would terminate the contract), but that a wide window for the balance of benefits to shift.
I grew up under communism. I don't like or don't care for communism, but I can't dispute that China lifted a huge number of people out of a warlord torn mess and misery. To some extent, Soviets did the same to Russian peasants, but of course, it got perverted along the way. But all things considered, I would take communism under soviets to being a serf under the Tsar.
China starved tens of millions of people for two decades, it was only after they started opening up the economy in the 70s and allowed people to own farms/shops that living standards started increasing.
This is just one instance: a hepatitis drug named Solvaldi. Costs $1000 a pill, need 84 pills for full course. How much does the drug actually cost? $300 and you can make it with the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective's chemistry reactor.
But why is this capitalist deaths? Cause 5 million people per year die from Hepatitis. And this drug is a *cure*. But insurance wont pay the $84000 needed for the cure. So they get maintenance drugs that dont cure, and those people die from it needlessly.
And the numbers are going up to 6 million a year of needless capitalist deaths, from a single drug.
We can easily look at corporate death panels, err, I mean medical insurance. Its insurance fraud if we lie, but to them, they can just deny treatment and wait out the death clock.
Capitalism is even more extractive and devastating on the populace. And instead of "capitalism causes X million deaths a year", nope, its a individual's fault. Its always the individuals fault, no matter how systemic the problem is.
Of course, it's probably not really possible to do such a comparison, because there are so many other factors, and state intervention is everywhere even in capitalist countries, via publicly funded research.
I think the only really fair way to compare which system causes more deaths than the other is to look at overall health outcomes and lifespans.
And to be fair, quite a few of the findings are basically restatements from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Then again, most 'economists' rarely ever get past page 30 of that treatise, like all the "unseen hands that realllly have to prevent monopolies etc etc etc"
Call it "colonialism" if you want but it screams "fake moralism"
So yes I think this is claptrap of the first order that exists so people can pretend it's of any value to reaffirm their echo chamber.
I think it's easy to conclude that the companies can more easily exploit workers in these locations, which points to colonialism and capitalist incentives. Instead of dismissing someone's research because of guilt by association, perhaps you can explain why this is not an exploitative practice?
It helps to also attempt to imagine a total absence of colonialism. Using a strict definition of domination this isn't too difficult though it may still be unlikely to ever occur. Using a loose definition you have to assume a world in which no country has any political, social, economic or cultural advantage over another. The simplest way to do this is to imagine a world of total isolationism where no country interacts with any other. Either that or a world in which only a single nation (or perhaps only three) exists. Neither are the happiest nor most diverse outcomes one would wish for. Imagining a perfect balance seems impossible, international trade requires it, differences in population size, productivity and resource distribution enforce it. Beyond that how would you even start to prevent a difference in say cultural influence? Even among Western nations there are enormous cultural gradients. Canada has tried to mandate the distribution of its own cultural media within its borders but even that isn't enough to prevent being swamped by the sheer volume of output from the US. China has the Great Firewall and yet its citizenry still demands access to Western culture.
So for any definition of colonialism you should also provide and abide by a definition of domination.
Colonialism is so overused as a term it's pointless. By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism and Bangladesh apparel colonialism.
Who can run open source models? Everyone in the world, or only a small subset of the population with access to computing products that are powerful enough to run models? Who builds those computing products? Where do their raw materials come from? Where are they mined and processed? Who manufactures and assembles the parts?
> (which are ever improving)
How are they being improved? Are moderation and data labeling jobs usually done by the same people who consume the outputs of the models, or are they outsourced for paltry wages?
> there is no moat for AI neither in software or hardware
No moat for whom? Can the data labelers above start their own AI hardware company?
> Look at yourself in the mirror and tell me it's not the pot calling the kettle black
So we should settle for inaction?
> By this logic China is doing Electric car colonialism
Where does the lithium for electric car batteries come from? What about other rare minerals?
> Bangladesh apparel colonialism
Aren't the people in sweatshops the exploited ones? And the ones who consume the products of their labor the colonialists?
The most complete capture is the one so internalized it doesn't even register as ideology anymore.
Who cares what the person describes themselves as. Do the claims being made validate with evidence, or not enough evidence, or are invalidated BY evidence?
If the claims are valid and provable, who cares about some label-bingo.
Because quite often, when done very vocally and publicly, it tends to be a lie or a cover for some other nefarious thing happening behind the scenes. See Donald Trump.
And that fact taints everything from the get-go.
> To filter out disturbing images or posts, or to keep chatbots from creating such content, AI systems have to be able to recognize it. That means that data workers must view horrifying images or text passages to label that content
This kind of work is definitely preferable to poverty, or even preferable to toiling in the farms. Its a decent job and some one has to do it and I'm glad someone who needs the money is doing it. I think it is misleading to portray this kind of job as uniquely harmful or stressful.
Putting someone in front of the worst of humanity (CSAM, murder, suicide, bestiality etc) for 9 hours a day at $2/hr seems inhumane because it may very well change who they are and how they think. Add to that the fact that it's sponsored by the richest companies on the planet for the benefit of the upper half and you get the current, IMO justified, criticisms.
someone has to do it but it's not a decent job. Content tagging and content moderation are basically the "ditch digging" of the white collar world and often comes with significant toll on those exposed to such content continuously.
This could imply banning the industry, but since most agree it's necessary, most would probably be in favor of psychological counciling and greater pay for these workers.
The point is we're subjecting desperate people to trauma before limited to first responders, police, and military, while providing them none of the pay, job security, or counciling of these above specialities.
You're phrasing this like third world countries have similar labor markets to the US, where anyone and anybody can go and find a high paying, "comfy" job.
Third world countries provide the convenience that first world countries like the US have come to expect. The cost of providing that "convenience" is that millions of people in India/China/Africa/Southeast Asia work for almost nothing to produce cheap crap that people buy in the US and then dispose of like it's nothing.
I am not saying it isn’t done today. Just that we should consider that as an option when coming from either side of this debate.