All articles tagged with #ai training
Kotaku reports leaked audio in which Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's AI is trained by watching ‘really smart people’ at the company as about 8,000 employees are laid off (10% of the workforce) and thousands more reassigned to AI initiatives, amid criticism over employee device tracking and Meta’s ongoing AI pivot.
Five major publishers and author Scott Turow filed a class-action suit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg, accusing Meta of training its generative AI platform Llama on millions of pirated books and articles without authorization, threatening publishers’ and authors’ livelihoods; Meta says such AI training can be fair use and vowed to fight the case in SDNY.
Ars Technica reports that Google's Gemini AI, embedded in Gmail and Drive, processes data for isolated tasks and may feed outputs into AI training, though Google says private content isn't used to train foundational models. Opting out of training is hard and buried in Gemini's Activity controls; disabling it often sacrifices useful features, a setup critics call dark patterns that undermine user autonomy. The article argues defaults push data collection and AI integration, raising ongoing privacy concerns amid antitrust scrutiny.
LinkedIn is testing an 'AI labor marketplace' that pays humans up to $150/hour to train AI systems across roles from coding to nursing, signaling a new gig category and placing LinkedIn in competition with startups like Mercor and Surge AI. The initiative highlights rapid growth in AI training work and a range of roles—from Excel/finance experts to nurses and linguists—while also underscoring cybersecurity risks in the sector, including notable data breaches at industry players.
The Register exposes a sprawling network of ad-tech vendors whose cookie and non-cookie trackers collect vast user data—IP addresses, device identifiers, location (precise and non-precise), profiles, and browsing activity—often for long durations and sometimes under legitimate-interest justifications. The piece highlights how this data ecosystem, plus storage beyond cookies, could be used to train AI models and influence ad targeting, raising privacy concerns over how much online activity is captured and stored across dozens of vendors.
Across the globe, thousands are monetizing everyday data—videos, ambient audio, even private chats—to train AI via marketplaces like Kled AI, Silencio, and Neon Mobile. Contributors in places like Cape Town, Ranchi, and Chicago earn small sums, often through broad, irrevocable licenses that allow boundless use and derivative works, with pay sometimes in USD but little recourse. While the money can help close gaps for people in economic hardship, experts warn the practice risks privacy harms, deepfakes, identity theft, and a precarious, wage-driven boom that mainly benefits platforms in wealthier countries as AI data needs outpace scraping from the open web.
Britannica and Merriam-Webster filed suit against OpenAI alleging that GPT-4 memorized substantial portions of their copyrighted content and outputs near-verbatim passages to train its AI, potentially diverting traffic away from Britannica; the case adds to a wave of publisher lawsuits over AI training and follows similar actions against OpenAI and a prior Anthropic settlement.
A Svenska Dagbladet investigation reveals Meta's Ray‑Ban smart glasses capture footage that is reviewed by human contractors for AI training, exposing bystanders to nude or sensitive content despite anonymization, highlighting ongoing privacy risks with wearable devices.
Swedish reports say offshore Meta workers in Kenya are labeling intimate and disturbing videos captured by Ray‑Ban smart glasses to train AI, including footage from bathrooms and clips showing personal data. Working under Sama, they describe being required to review such material, raising privacy and consent concerns as Meta pushes live AI features and potential facial recognition, amid related moderator‑work lawsuits.
Indian rural and marginalised women working from home perform data annotation and content moderation to train AI, often viewing thousands of disturbing images and videos daily. The work exacts a heavy psychological toll—nightmares, emotional numbness, and long-term mental-health risks—while pay remains low and protections limited, all within a precarious NDAs-bound, globally connected AI supply chain.
Boston Dynamics is developing AI-powered humanoid robots, like Atlas, that learn tasks through machine learning and demonstrations, with potential applications in factory work and beyond, raising both technological and economic implications.
Elon Musk's xAI is expanding its data center complex in Memphis by purchasing a third building in Southaven, Mississippi, increasing its AI computing capacity to nearly 2 gigawatts, as part of its plans to build the world's largest AI training data center.
A New York Times reporter and six authors sued Google, xAI, OpenAI, and other tech companies for using copyrighted books without permission to train their AI chatbots, marking the first case to include xAI and highlighting ongoing legal battles over AI training data rights.
An activist group called Anna’s Archive claims to have scraped 86 million music files from Spotify, which they plan to release online, raising concerns about copyright infringement and the use of pirated music for AI training. Spotify confirmed the breach but stated it did not compromise their entire catalog and has taken measures to prevent further unauthorized access. The incident highlights ongoing debates over copyright laws and AI training data, with governments and industry stakeholders seeking balanced policies.
Utkarsh Amitabh, a 34-year-old entrepreneur and academic, earns $200/hour training AI models for micro1, leveraging his expertise in business, tech, and philosophy. He values the role for its intellectual challenge and flexibility, viewing AI's impact on jobs with cautious optimism, believing in a future of human-AI collaboration. The job highlights the growing importance of domain experts in AI development and the evolving landscape of work in the AI era.