TechScape: How cheap, outsourced labour in Africa is shaping AI English

Workers in Africa have been exploited first by being paid a pittance to help make chatbots, then by having their own words become AI-ese. Plus, new AI gadgets are coming for your smartphones

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We're witnessing the birth of AI-ese, and it's not what anyone could have guessed. Let's delve deeper.

If you've spent enough time using AI assistants, you'll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated. Without a concerted effort to break the systems out of their default register, the text they spit out is, while grammatically and semantically sound, ineffably generated.

The images pop up in Mophat Okinyi's mind when he's alone, or when he's about to sleep. Okinyi, a former content moderator for OpenAI's ChatGPT in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of four people in that role who have filed a petition to the Kenyan government calling for an investigation into what they describe as exploitative conditions for contractors reviewing the content that powers artificial intelligence programs.