🤖 Kenyan Man Claims He Was Forced by Employer to Work As a Sex Bot
Michael Jeffrey Asia from Nairobi, Kenya, gave a detailed and very emotional account to the Data Workers' Inquiry project of how he was "exploited" by Australian company New Media Service, which manages platforms for sex chats.
The man had previously worked remotely as a data labeling specialist. Still, he then took a job as a "text chat operator" to earn extra money, signing a non-disclosure agreement.
He had to write messages in three to five chats at the same time, pretending to be different "personalities" of different genders— the men he was chatting with believed they were communicating with a woman. From time to time, Michael had clients asking whether he was a human or a bot. This led to the assumption that he was replying on behalf of an AI bot, and that his and his colleagues' correspondence was being used to train AI companions.
"I was the human pretending to be the machine pretending to be human," Asia says, emphasizing that he suffered psychological trauma from this work.
🚨 Michael's pay was only $0.05 per message. However, in reality, this is hundreds or even thousands of times more expensive than a single response from a regular LLM. At the same time, Asia himself notes that the employer never mentioned the sex correspondence would be used to train AI, especially since real dialogues are not necessary for this.
Therefore, the benefits of such "exploitation" might be questionable, and the facts in the Kenyan man's account might have been slightly manipulated.
@hiaimediaen
