Behind every superstar chatbot, there's a lot of unsung human labor.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Every week, it seems, the world is stunned by another advance in artificial intelligence.

Text to image, generators like Dolly, to the latest chatbot, GPT-4.

What makes these tools impressive is the enormous amount of data they're trained on, like all

the images and text on the internet.

But the process of machine learning relies on a lot of human data laborers.

It's worked that often gets overlooked, says Sarah Roberts.

He's a professor of information studies and director of the Center for Critical Internet

Inquiry at UCLA.

In the case of something like chat GPT and the engines that it's using, it's really going

out and pretty much data mining, massive portions of the internet.

Now we all know that the internet is filled with the best information and the greatest stuff

all the time, right?

So what's required for something like that is to have human beings with their special

ability of discernment and good judgment and sometimes visceral reactions to material

and in the case of chat GPT, to coal material out, material that users or more importantly

companies would not want inside of their products as a potential output.

And so that means these data laborers, much like content moderators, spend their days

working on some of the worst stuff that we can imagine.

And in this case, they're trying to build models to coal that out automatically.

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