Some quotes from the article:
There is something very strange about having this very intimate view into someone’s life. It feels odd to see someone’s daily drive, but it’s also an important part of correcting and refining the program.
We review about five and a half to six hours of footage per day. It can be very hard to focus. You can get in this kind of fog when you’re just watching clip after clip and it can be difficult to keep yourself sane.
Anytime you’re not clicking around in the software program, it tracks you as if you aren’t working and it basically sets off an alarm to your superiors.
These jobs sound very dystopian to me, and a bit psychopathic as well. All the movies I watched growing up about dystopian societies is reflected in what this guy says about his job.
When this whole ‘training’ trend started a few years ago, there were companies offering image and video labelling services.
It turned out they were mostly sweatshops in low-income countries, where people sat in front of monitors and just dragged boumding boxes around sections of images and picked from an icon menu. Here’s a car, here’s a person, here’s an apple. That sort of thing. You didn’t even need to know how to read or write.
Of course, the quality was questionable, so they needed a second layer of supervisors verifying the choices. But even with that, the cost was way lower than having an engineer or QA person do it. IIRC, there was a bit of hue and cry when stories came out of big tech companies supporting sweatshop conditions.
Sounds like it’s still ongoing.