Recently I read someone’s comment on social media stating roughly:
I’m working for a tech startup training an AI system for $20 / hour .. and it’s a lot less than I would normally take but I really need the money… Plus I’m going learn stuff about AI.
If you have specialized knowledge beyond just textbook information…
If you have years of expertise in your profession, built through your honest work, sweat and tears…
DO NOT accept jobs like this. Especially for meager amounts of pay.
I am saying this as someone who knows how to code and comes from the “tech world”.
This is a rant but I’m going to address a few points (if anyone can prove anything different and I’ll gladly update this but I’m not seeing it).
AI training doesn’t pay well*
I’ve heard multiple stories now of people getting paid to train AI who started with a high wage, then later were forced lower and lower until like the comment above it became lower than the wage they started at in the career (at the entry level).
*Even if you get a high wage to start, unless you’re a dev… stay away. Right now it’s not worth it.
You’re not going to “learn to build AI”
Excuse my bluntness, but this idea is like thinking that working at a bank will teach you about engineering a safe or worse… thinking that cattle know how to run a farm. *I don’t think people are cattle but many people in software do look down on others and are actively “mining” our knowledge & expertise to create these systems.
If you are not a software engineer or otherwise involved in the systems behind the training data you are very unlikely to have access to anything other than a training data input interface of some kind.
A lot of AI training is not that exciting.
From what I’m seeing a lot of companies are not hiring new permanent staff to train AI systems. Mostly companies are just assigning existing staff to help correct a partially trained AI system. They will often pay a consultant to get started.
The bulk of the AI training, at this level – the more consumer level, is just feeding in knowledge bases, documents, and other text into the AI … then someone will just do a few small corrections. After that, the AI training “position” is basically finished and any staff assigned there will be moved elsewhere or fired.
Extra refinements later can be added with not a lot of effort, and definitely not enough to warrant a permanent staff position.
“The startup company promised me…”
I would be very suspicious of any promises because even a clearly stated contract can be broken.
Most people I’ve talked to (connected to startups) have been made all sorts of promises about how they will be some “big” part of their company going forward… I hate to break people’s dreams based on these promises but your expertise will be fed into a system and your usefulness will reduce to almost nothing for that company.
There could be some exceptions but that will not be the usual regular person feeding in and correcting training data. The main exceptions I’m thinking of are brand ambassador type people who might be big enough to license their name to represent the AI system (but I haven’t seen that yet).
Don’t get me wrong you are important to their AI training but also replaceable.
By all means, if your company can show me something different let me know.
How much should I be paid to train my replacement?
Considering these systems will likely be the end of your job as it exists, think of it like training someone who will replace you at your job because they are firing you afterwards.
Ask more than your regular rate, and get as much as you can.
In the end these systems will be built and trained, but we can ask for more.. the AI companies are certainly going to make a lot of money on this.
Also think about this, tech companies know how to create software but what they don’t know is the expertise in your field. Why give them for next to nothing what took you decades to learn through hard fought experiences? They can scan and upload all of the knowledge on the internet in your field but they can’t know the full extent of your experience so that’s why they need you – to sift and judge the quality of training data and to add your own.
Don’t sell yourself short, because for most people this is going to be a short-time job of training the system that will be the end of your existing position.
Get ready to pivot in your field.
We’re all going to have to do what we can and I mean for every field.
As AI work output eclipses what most people can do what will we do?
We have to keep learning, and learning to do better, now more than ever.
Build your own business
We see more & more these days companies are actively trying to remove as many human jobs as they can. Even small businesses are removing staff instead of supporting people in their communities.
Why wait for these soulless companies to give us a job?
We can still work in ways that other humans can value. We can use our unique characteristics, our human experiences, our stories, our intuition, our creativity.
I choose to work towards a future that respects humans.