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https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/2/3/in-rural-kenya-young-people-join-ai-revolution>
"
Naivasha, Kenya – Caroline Njau comes from a family of farmers who tend to
fields of maize, wheat, and potatoes in the hilly terrain near Nyahururu, 180
kilometres (112 miles) north of the capital Nairobi.
But Njau has chosen a different path in life.
These days, the 30-year-old lives in Naivasha, a scenic town at the centre of
Kenya’s flower industry and midway between Nyahururu and Nairobi. Seated in her
living room with a cup of milk tea, she labels data for artificial intelligence
(AI) companies abroad on an app. The sun rises over the unpaved streets of her
neighbourhood as she flicks through images of tarmac roads, intersections and
sidewalks on her smartphone while carefully drawing boxes around various
objects; traffic lights, cars, pedestrians, and signposts. The designer of the
app – an American subcontractor to Silicon Valley companies – pays her $3 an
hour.
Njau is a so-called annotator, and her annotation of data compiles the building
blocks that train artificial intelligence to recognise patterns in real life,
in this case, with self-driving cars.
“My parents have not fully embraced technology because they find it hard to
learn. But I always loved science. Data annotation creates opportunities, and
you do not need a degree to do this – just your phone and an internet
connection,” says Njau who studied teaching but has been annotating since 2021.
Kenya is emerging as a hub for such online work, rising to compete with
countries like India and the Philippines. The birth of tech start-ups since the
late 2000s, followed by the entry of tech outsourcing companies, along with
business-friendly policies, skilled labour and high-speed internet have all led
to an economy where digital jobs are the bread and butter for a large portion
of the youth. In 2021, a survey by Kenya Private Sector Alliance (KEPSA) showed
that at least 1.2 million Kenyans are working online, most of them informally.
But Nairobi’s data annotators have recently revealed a less rosy side to this
industry. In a
Time article from last year, workers at an outsourcing firm in
Nairobi described the “torture” they went through while labelling pieces of
texts drawn from the darkest corners of the internet – all in a quest to make
OpenAI’s ChatGPT able to recognise harmful content. According to the piece, the
workers were paid less than $2 an hour to do this."
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
