Google Cuts Thousands of Workers Improving Search After Search Results Scientifically Shown to Suck::“These workers provide critical support that keeps Google’s flagship Search results and Bard AI safe and functional for the company’s billions of users,” the union representing the contractors said.
The headline for parents is that Google is firing a bunch of people who keep gore and porn out of Google safe search.
I’ll be right back, I need to grab some popcorn for this.
After I double check that my own kid’s browsers all default to DuckDuckGo…
Tbh most of nsfw content moderation has been automated for several years now and ML image recognition has come a long way. I’m a bit surprised they’re only firing 10% of raters.
I’m surprised they’re paying them at all. They could offer an extra couple of gigs of storage and people would do it for free.
Reasons probably include liability. It can be a pretty fucked up job seeing some of this content for hours a day.
I think it was RadioLab who did an episode on the content moderators for Facebook. To make matters worse, much of that work is outsourced to developing countries who get paid pennies and have no mental health resources available for ingesting so much traumatic content for 10+ hours a shift every day. It’s been a few years since I listened to the episode, but I think the turnover was extremely high due to the understandable burnout. The episode also touched on law enforcement workers that have to review that content for legal cases and the mental toll it takes on them.
Hopefully, one day, people won’t be needed for that kind of work as automation improves to the point that it has a 100% success rate in detection and removing. And of course, hopefully one day there are no longer humans creating/producing such disgusting content in the first place.
We’ll always need human review of photos like that unless we decide it’s ok to convict people for crimes based solely on an AI’s judgement. And we’ll still need people to deal with horrific shit in real life.