[digdigdag]

1. These jobs are situated in Africa for the precise reason that other usual outsourcing countries have become increasingly expensive and prohibitive for this type of work. These workers are exposed to the most vile things the human mind can produce and they do it for starvation wages day in and day out.

2. Their leverage is their sanity and willingness to be able to be exposed to unconscionable content. Many places in the world would categorically block this kind of gig simply for being damaging to the mind, and rightly so. And even in countries where this work is permissible, it would otherwise expose the company to future liability in terms of emotional trauma.

3. This 80% figure is a number fabricated from thin air. These workers don't work in call centers. They are content moderators in some shape or form -- a job that requires not just reading comprehension but being able to weigh certain current events, cultural queues, unspoken and spoken language, and other data that you can't magically feed into a machine.

S

[anonylizard]

These workers are not slaves, they are free to work anywhere else. If moderating posts on a computer really is worse than say working at a farm, or a a clothing factory, then the workers would leave.

They don't work in call centers of course. But the workers who currently work in call centers, can swoop in and compete for their jobs. I can tell you that plenty of people on HN, would rather deal with moderating awful content, than to talk to endless waves of people who can't read 3 step instructions. And I would prefer either compared to say diving in sewage.

If you don't think GPT-4 can replace offshore call centers very rapidly, then you need to talk to those companies that do employ them. Onshore call centers handle more complex stuff that is harder to outsource, offshore ones not so much.

[zztop44]

The workers could leave. Or they could unionize and attempt to improve their employment conditions. Maybe it will work. Maybe the company will fire them and replace them with other workers.

But I have to imagine that the workers’ own assessment of their leverage is more accurate than someone on the other side of the world who read an article headline. And it would appear that at least some of them, based on that assessment have decided to give unionizing a shot.