Hey, it's Kate.

Today our producer Annie Menoff is going to bring you a story.

It's about a little known part of the AI workforce, the people whose job it was to help filter

out references to violence and sexual abuse on what would become chat GPT.

Here's Annie.

My colleague Karen Howe covers artificial intelligence.

And earlier this year, she found herself doing an interview in a kind of unusual place.

We're currently walking through, what is this, a field?

Is this vegetables that people are growing?

Karen was in a vegetable patch on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya.

So I was there to meet this worker named Alex and we had originally planned to meet in

one of his friends' apartments, but there was construction work happening.

So we were looking for another place to record.

That's why they ended up in the veggie patch.

Do you want to describe more?

I'm seeing a lot of houses, some grasses, some people in our right side watching us.

So yeah, it's a perfect scenario to get this podcast going.

Karen wanted to talk to Alex Cairo because Alex helped make possible one of the most viral

tech products of all time, chat GPT, the AI chatbot created by the company OpenAI.

When you use chat GPT and it doesn't spit out hate speech or extreme violent or pornographic

content,

it's partly thanks to Alex and his colleagues in Kenya.

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