ChatGPT, as I have said on several occasions, seems to me to be an absolutely revolutionary technological innovation. For how well it works, for how its creators were able to articulate answers within reach of all viewers, for its ability to hold a conversation, for its versatility… in short, the list of praises I believe this OpenAI artificial intelligence deserves to be long and elegant. And yes, I know he makes mistakes, but we have to remember that his potential for improvement is astounding.

Now, not everything is positive around trendy tech services. It has a much darker face, and no, unfortunately I don’t mean the bugs I mentioned earlier, and I don’t mean apps that try to monetize a free service for their own sake. No, I’m talking about a business decision that may be legal, of course, but ethically so reprehensible that it can devalue an otherwise glorious service.

Relocation, relocation or whatever we want to call the technique of subcontracting certain services to countries where it is much cheaper is nothing new. The Anglo-Saxon world has been doing this for decades, mainly in India, and when it comes to our country, many customer service calls remind us that most of these calls are received from call centers in Latin America for speaking in both cases only of a specific type of activity.

Mind you, I’m not saying it’s bad. by itself, because in certain circumstances it is true that it can be a great stimulus for those local economies, and when it happens in developing countries, it becomes a factor that substantially strengthens them. In addition, wage differentials can improve the competitiveness of firms, something that, like it or not, is now part of the business credo they must subscribe to in order to survive.

The problem, which is debatable, is that so-called first world firms are resorting to offshoring to pay miserable wages even in the battered economies of the countries that have been chosen to do so. And according to an investigation conducted by the prestigious Time magazine, we have been facing a case of this type since OpenAI hired Kenyan workers for less than $2 an hour for ChatGPT.

An investigation, citing multiple sources, reveals that the wage for outsourced workers in Kenya through Sama, a San Francisco-based company that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India and is used by many technology companies, ranged from $1.32. up to $2 an hour, depending on their seniority and performance. Numbers that should make those responsible for OpenAI blush, even more so today, when multi-million dollar investments are coming to the company thanks to ChatGPT.

Workers have been outsourced for a very important part of ChatGPT, feeding the AI ​​toxic language, hate speech and content that the AI ​​can detect and therefore remove. Following precedents with other AIs, many of the early tests done by the general public with ChatGPT consisted of checking to see if it reflected some type of bias in this regard, but the system seems to be very well trained in this regard.

The development of artificial intelligence is amazing, but in cases like ChatGPT, it does so at the cost of job insecurity, according to the Partnership on AI, a coalition of AI organizations that curiously includes OpenAI: “Despite the critical role these data enrichment professionals play, a growing body of research reveals the precarious working conditions these workers face.“.

It’s curious because we’ve been talking about ethics in artificial intelligence for quite some time, a very interesting debate that still has a lot to say, but it’s paradoxical that we’re focusing on the ethical behavior of artificial intelligence, while the development of them is based, at least in part, on a very questionable practices on an ethical level. Legal yes, but very questionable. Perhaps, even if only in part, we should learn some of the ethics that we want to teach the machines, because otherwise it is possible that over time they will move us in this sense as well.