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Google Cuts Thousands of Workers Improving Search After Search Results Scientifically Shown to Suck (www.vice.com)

submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Reasons probably include liability. It can be a pretty fucked up job seeing some of this content for hours a day.

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 4 points 10 months ago

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.