🧠 OpenAI in hot water over paying Kenyan workers $2

Greetings AI fanatics,

Another day has passed and there are almost too many updates to keep up with.

It's like the speed of technological progress is accelerating... *cough* singularity *cough*.

🔦 Today's AI spotlights: 

• Open AI paid Kenyan workers less than $2 per hour

• AI bot beats Rocket League elite players

🔦 OPENAI PAID KENYAN WORKERS $2 PER HOUR

OpenAI has been in the news for a lot of positive reasons lately (ChatGPT-3, $10 Billion Microsoft investment)...

Unfortunately, they are now in the news for the wrong reasons.

Yesterday, TIME reported, that OpenAI paid Kenyan workers below $2 per hour to help "make ChatGPT less toxic".

Let's unpack this...

At first, ChatGPT trained on "hundreds of billions of words" from all over the internet. This included a lot of unseemly content.

This meant that the tool was prone to give responses that were deemed violent, sexist or racist... Not great.

To counteract this behavior, OpenAI outsourced work to a partner in Kenya called Sama.

Sama then paid workers $1.32-$2.00 per hour to help label examples of bad speech from large swaths of data*.

ChatGPT then leveraged these labels to scrub toxic text from its training datasets.

*Note: Sama claims to have lifted 40,000 people globally from poverty.

The key takeaways:

• It's never a good look when tech unicorn compensates international workers at such a low rate.

• If companies self-label certain content as "bad," it will introduce bias to these models.

🔦 AI BOT BEATS ROCKET LEAGUE ELITE PLAYERS

TRIGGER WARNING: If you are a serious gamer then you are not going to like this story!

Last week, it was reported that users of a popular video game Rocket League, had used an AI bot to cheat in the game.

Rocket league, is a game where players use cars to try to push a giant soccer ball into the goal. Think soccer meets monster trucks.

It's become very popular over the years and has a league of elite online players.

One of these players noticed that a recent opponent of his was not playing like a human. The opponent's moves were abnormal but effective. Nothing like how a human plays.

It turns out his suspicions were correct, as he had encountered a known AI bot by the name of "Nexto".

Here's where the story gets even crazier...

Back in 2020, the parent company of Rocket League, encouraged developers to creates bots like Nexto.

They were only meant for practice, but it's clear that they've found their way into online ranked play.

The key takeaway:

• The global Esports market is project to reach $5.7 Billion by 2030. As it grows in size, the incentive to use AI bots to cheat will increase. We need better safeguards in place.

📰 OTHER HEADLINES

Google drops massive AI report: Google's 7,000-word blog post flexes their advances across language models and more. 

Sam Altman reveals more details about future of OpenAI: He mentioned that the Microsoft deal isn't exclusive and that generative video is coming.

Therapy by chatbot?: NPR reporter Yuki Noguchi breaks down the pros and cons of using AI for mental health services.

🖼️ AI ART PIECE

Prompt: Baby groot, on the beach --ar 3:2 --s 250 by @a.ntsg933

🤖 CHATGPT PROMPT OF THE DAY

Reddit user uses ChatGPT to write a story about how AI will take over the world, and then leverages Midjourney to turn it into a comic.