Grunts one & all ...

Image by Getty / Futurism

If you're a Marine, the word grunt is an honor as grunts are the warrior class of the Marines, something not taken lightly by any stretch of the imagination. In AI terms, the word grunt is assigned to people being dehumanized in order to support a system becoming increasingly recognized as something rather marginal as seen by resent screwups and hallucinations done by entities once thought infallible but are proving to be anything but.

To whit.

It Turns Out That Google's AI Is Being Trained by an Army of Poorly Treated Human Grunts

"AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor."

Google is depending on thousands of contractors to train the AI behind its flagship chatbot Gemini.

As The Guardian reports, many of these "AI raters," tasked with instructing the model and correcting its many mistakes, are facing poor working conditions and are often exposed to extremely disturbing content.

It's yet again a worrying reminder that despite tech companies attempting to paint their AI models as miraculous, autonomous fountains of knowledge and cognition that could eventually replace human workers, the current reality is the exact opposite: AI relies on the labor of huge numbers of hidden humans to give it the illusion of intelligence.

And it's not just the current crop of large language models — AI raters across the globe are being tasked to label data for AI-based, self-driving car software, and other related applications.

"AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor," Distributed AI Research Institute's Adio Dinika told the Guardian. "These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable."

According to the newspaper, raters with no special expertise are being asked to verify the accuracy across highly complex domains such as architecture, astrophysics, and even medical guidance.

One rater told the newspaper that she was pressured to work faster, while being tasked with training the AI on sensitive medical topics like chemotherapy treatments for bladder cancer.

"I pictured a person sitting in their car finding out that they have bladder cancer and googling what I’m editing," she said.

This is akin to insurance companies approving or disapproving procedures done by an coterie of unqualified and expendable people making life and death decisions in ways boggling the mind.

Mishits ...