Meet the TikTok Girlies Helping ChatGPT Become Even Smarter

It’s not a stretch to say that every tech company and their mother launched chatbots powered by generative artificial intelligence this year. Take for example Google’s Bard, Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft’s Copilot, and, of course, OpenAI’s ChatGPT. These chatbots are based on incredibly powerful large language models (LLM) and, in the short amount of time they’ve been accessible to the public, they’ve improved tremendously.

Such rapid refinement speaks to the power of LLMs and generative AI—but it’s also a testament to the behind-the-scenes work of hundreds of thousands of gig workers. These humans do a little-known job called data annotation, which entails rating and describing the inputs and outputs of AI models to help the chatbot “learn.” These tasks could involve reading and ranking AI-generated poetry, or labeling a menu’s text with what words correspond to food items, drinks, and prices.

Historically, companies have exported this labor overseas and paid workers pennies. But recently, they’ve been outsourcing data annotation work to a different and unexpected demographic—and it could lead to some unforeseen and even dangerous consequences.

Read more at The Daily Beast.