#Outsourcing Data Labeling

[itesservices]

Optimize your supply chain with data labeling services to improve demand forecasting accuracy. By leveraging labeled data, businesses can predict market trends, manage inventory, and streamline logistics operations. This ensures cost efficiency and enhanced customer satisfaction. Embrace advanced data solutions to stay ahead in a competitive market. Unlock your potential with accurate forecasting today 

[givrally]

Rbing because this is overall a very good list, but don't use shinigami eyes. There's no oversight in the process, no feasible way to appeal, and it's been known to flag actual trans people. A lot. Sometimes for no reason. It's the tumblr equivalent of cooties.

here's a list of mozilla add-ons for all of you tumblrinas out there to have a better internet experience

also, if you like my post, please reblog it. Tumblr hates links but i had to put them so you adhd bitches actually download them <3 i know because i am also adhd bitches

BASIC STUFF:

AdGuard AdBlocker / uBlock Origin : adguard is a basic adblock and with origin you can also block any other element you want. for example i got rid of the shop menu on tumblr

Privacy Badger : this add on will block trackers. if an element contains a tracker it will give you the option to use it or not

Shinigami Eyes: this will highlight transphobic and trans friendly users and sites using different colors by using a moderated database. perfect to avoid terfs on any social media. i will explain how to use this and other add-ons on android as well under the read more cut

THINGS YOU TUMBLINAS WANT:

Xkit: the best tumblr related add on. with many customizable options, xkit not only enhances your experience from a visual standpoint, but provides some much needed accessibility tools

bonus: if you are into tf2 and wanna be a cool cat, you can also get the old version to add cool reblog icons

AO3 enhancer: some basic enhancements including reading time and the ability to block authors and tags

YOUTUBE

Return of the YouTube Dislike : pretty self explanatory

Youtube non-stop: gets rid of the annoying "Video paused. Continue watching?" popup when you have a video in the background

SponsorBlock: gives you options to skip either automatically or manually sponsors, videoclip non music sectors and discloses other type of sponsorships/paid partnerships

Enhancer for YouTube: adds some useful options such as custom play speed, let's you play videos in a window and most important of all, it allows you to make the youtube interface as ugly as your heart desires. I can't show a full image of what it looks like because i've been told its eye strainy and i want this post to be accessible but look at this <3

PocketTube: allows you to organize your subscriptions into groups

YouTube Comment Search: what it says

FINDING STUFF

WayBack Machine: you probably know about this site and definitely should get the add on. this allows you to save pages and access older versions with the click of a button. while you can search wayback using web archives, please get this one as well as it allows you to easily save pages and contribute to the archive.

Web Archives: it allows you to search through multiple archives and search engines including WayBack Machine, Google, Yandex and more.

Search by Image: allows you to reverse image search using multiple search engines (in my experience yandex tends to yield the best results)

Image Search Options: similar to the last one

this next section is pretty niche but... STEAM AND STEAM TRADING

SteamDB: adds some interesting and useful statistics

Augmented Steam: useful info specially for browsing and buying games

TF2 Trade Helper: an absolute godsend, lets you add items in bundles, keeps track of your keys and metal and your recent trades, displays links to the backpack tf page next to users profiles and more. look it tells me how much moneys i have and adds metal to trades without clicking one by one oh may god

IN CONCLUSION: oooooh you want to change to firefox so badly, you want to delete chrome and all the chrome clones that are actually just spyware and use firefox

HOW TO USE MOZILLA ADD-ONS ON YOUR PHONE

if you already use firefox on android, you'll know there are certain add-ons compatible with the app, some of them even being made just for the mobile version such as Video Background Play FIx. while most of them are pretty useful, some more specific ones aren't available on this version of the browser, but there's a way of getting some of them to work

you need to download the firefox nightly app, which is basically the same as the regular firefox browser but with the ability of activating developer mode. you can find how to do that here. once you've enabled it, you need to create a collection with all the add ons you want. i wouldn't recommend adding extensions if the creators haven't talked about phone compatibility, but XKit and Shinigami Eyes should work

also, don't tell the government this secret skater move, but you can try using both the regular firefox browser and nightly so you can have youtube videos in a floating box while you browse social media.

see? i can block this terf while Rick Rolling the people following this tutorial. isn't that tubular?

[springbord-seo]

Data labeling in machine learning involves the process of assigning relevant tags or annotations to a dataset, which helps the algorithm to learn and make accurate predictions. Learn more

[andrewleousa]

Any AI model is as smart as the data it is fed with. Data labeling outsourcing helps you get pixel-perfect and semantically segmented accurately labeled training datasets to fuel the smart models. Get in touch with professionals today.

[mariacallous]

AI projects like OpenAI’s ChatGPT get part of their savvy from some of the lowest-paid workers in the tech industry—contractors often in poor countries paid small sums to correct chatbots and label images. On Wednesday, 97 African workers who do AI training work or online content moderation for companies like Meta and OpenAI published an open letter to President Biden, demanding that US tech companies stop “systemically abusing and exploiting African workers.”

Most of the letter’s signatories are from Kenya, a hub for tech outsourcing, whose president, William Ruto, is visiting the US this week. The workers allege that the practices of companies like Meta, OpenAI, and data provider Scale AI “amount to modern day slavery.” The companies did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A typical workday for African tech contractors, the letter says, involves “watching murder and beheadings, child abuse and rape, pornography and bestiality, often for more than 8 hours a day.” Pay is often less than $2 per hour, it says, and workers frequently end up with post-traumatic stress disorder, a well-documented issue among content moderators around the world.

The letter’s signatories say their work includes reviewing content on platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, as well as labeling images and training chatbot responses for companies like OpenAI that are developing generative-AI technology. The workers are affiliated with the African Content Moderators Union, the first content moderators union on the continent, and a group founded by laid-off workers who previously trained AI technology for companies such as Scale AI, which sells datasets and data-labeling services to clients including OpenAI, Meta, and the US military. The letter was published on the site of the UK-based activist group Foxglove, which promotes tech-worker unions and equitable tech.

In March, the letter and news reports say, Scale AI abruptly banned people based in Kenya, Nigeria, and Pakistan from working on Remotasks, Scale AI’s platform for contract work. The letter says that these workers were cut off without notice and are “owed significant sums of unpaid wages.”

“When Remotasks shut down, it took our livelihoods out of our hands, the food out of our kitchens,” says Joan Kinyua, a member of the group of former Remotasks workers, in a statement to WIRED. “But Scale AI, the big company that ran the platform, gets away with it, because it’s based in San Francisco.”

Though the Biden administration has frequently described its approach to labor policy as “worker-centered.” The African workers’ letter argues that this has not extended to them, saying “we are treated as disposable.”

“You have the power to stop our exploitation by US companies, clean up this work and give us dignity and fair working conditions,” the letter says. “You can make sure there are good jobs for Kenyans too, not just Americans."

Tech contractors in Kenya have filed lawsuits in recent years alleging that tech-outsourcing companies and their US clients such as Meta have treated workers illegally. Wednesday’s letter demands that Biden make sure that US tech companies engage with overseas tech workers, comply with local laws, and stop union-busting practices. It also suggests that tech companies “be held accountable in the US courts for their unlawful operations aboard, in particular for their human rights and labor violations.”

The letter comes just over a year after 150 workers formed the African Content Moderators Union. Meta promptly laid off all of its nearly 300 Kenya-based content moderators, workers say, effectively busting the fledgling union. The company is currently facing three lawsuits from more than 180 Kenyan workers, demanding more humane working conditions, freedom to organize, and payment of unpaid wages.

“Everyone wants to see more jobs in Kenya,” Kauna Malgwi, a member of the African Content Moderators Union steering committee, says. “But not at any cost. All we are asking for is dignified, fairly paid work that is safe and secure.”

[fursasaida]

Though the Biden administration has frequently described its approach to labor policy as “worker-centered.” The African workers’ letter argues that this has not extended to them, saying “we are treated as disposable.”

“You have the power to stop our exploitation by US companies, clean up this work and give us dignity and fair working conditions,” the letter says. “You can make sure there are good jobs for Kenyans too, not just Americans."

Tech contractors in Kenya have filed lawsuits in recent years alleging that tech-outsourcing companies and their US clients such as Meta have treated workers illegally. Wednesday’s letter demands that Biden make sure that US tech companies engage with overseas tech workers, comply with local laws, and stop union-busting practices. It also suggests that tech companies “be held accountable in the US courts for their unlawful operations aboard, in particular for their human rights and labor violations.”

The letter comes just over a year after 150 workers formed the African Content Moderators Union. Meta promptly laid off all of its nearly 300 Kenya-based content moderators, workers say, effectively busting the fledgling union. The company is currently facing three lawsuits from more than 180 Kenyan workers, demanding more humane working conditions, freedom to organize, and payment of unpaid wages.

“Everyone wants to see more jobs in Kenya,” Kauna Malgwi, a member of the African Content Moderators Union steering committee, says. “But not at any cost. All we are asking for is dignified, fairly paid work that is safe and secure.”

[sudaca-swag]

https://www.tumblr.com/sudaca-swag/767116058622590976/seeing-small-countries-that-have-never-done-damage?source=share

i don't necessarily disagree but...north korea are helping funding russia's invasion and war on ukraine, where they are killing civilians and taking their land? And how do these europeans countrys you mention main income come from weapon...i'm swedish and i did not realize that was our main income nor that we are colonizing any country.

If you think for one second that north Korea is at the scale of economical and political power to be able to single handedly supply Russia like say the US does with Israel you're wrong, in any case at most they would be an outsourced factory to jump around international regulations for the Russian government, and if you think that Europe and the US arent benefitting immensely from the weapon economy regarding the Ukraine-Russia conflict you're very wrong, they're in no hurry to close that gold mine. So let's better talk about what actually moves the wheel which are the billions and billions of US dollars and European riches going into funding wars and genocides across the world directly from the hand of western politicians.

And as for the Sweden comment, here's an article from last may from Le Monde, Sweden is the 13th largest arm export country and is unfortunately looking to climb up the ladder faster no matter how green they pretend to go amongst their citizens for votes, I suggest you read it because it says some very interesting things about those in power in your country and their ties to said war industries, and how war around the globe is the joint group effort of rich countries coming together for even more profit. I'll put some of the article down here since it's locked past the first paragraphs, but if you Google "Sweden arm industry" you will be surprised at the huge amount of articles like this written about this, you should check them out they're quite short: "Certain Nordic nations have emerged as significant suppliers of security technologies and weapon systems internationally. Simultaneously, these countries are widely perceived and labelled as the ‘do-gooders’ in global affairs. This perception is supported by many characterisations of the Nordics as ‘agents of a world common good’ and ‘moral superpowers’ ".

And here's some more data from 2022: In 2014, it was the third largest weapons exporter per capita at $53.1 per capita, behind only Israel at $97.7 and Russia at $57.7. From 2009 to 2019, it was the world’s ninth largest arms exporter in U.S. dollars with a cumulative value of $14.3 billion. In the same time period, it ranked eighth in arms as a percentage of total exports. Swedish factories produce not just small arms, but advanced systems like fighter aircraft, missiles, tanks, submarines, corvettes, and air-defense platforms.

"While Western countries nominally define themselves by individualism and meritocracy, Sweden highlights the viability of dynastic, family-oriented elites in creating and maintaining powerful industrial societies. Sweden is in fact an exemplar of a unique European model of governance and political economy, but one that cleverly and counterintuitively wraps elite-led industrial strength intended to support military capacity in an egalitarian and pacifist packaging"

"Saab's share price has soared, more than tripling since February 2022. Orders have exploded. The Swedish manufacturer invested €150 million in its production capacity. Nothing like this had happened since the group began manufacturing Carl Gustafs in 1948, according to Michael Höglund, head of the Land Combat division. Several factories will be built in Sweden and abroad, notably in India. The aim is to quadruple deliveries of anti-tank weapons and ammunition by 2025, from 100,000 to 400,000 units a year.

Johansson said the war in Ukraine was a formidable "showcase" for Saab. In 2023, the group's orders, already up in 2022, climbed by 23%, as did its sales, which reached 51.6 billion Swedish krona (€4.5 billion), while its profit grew by 51%, ending at 3.4 billion krona.

Over the past year, the manufacturer, which employs over 21,000 people worldwide, including 16,000 in Sweden, has increased its workforce by almost 2,500 and is continuing to recruit. And it's not the only one. The entire Swedish arms industry is abuzz – a sector that brings together around 200 companies, some 60 of which are foreign-owned. In 2022, these companies, with sales of 48.5 billion krona, employed over 28,000 people. "We don't yet have the result for 2023, but it should be much higher," said Robert Limmergard, director of the Swedish Security and Defense Industry Association.

Demand is largely fuelled by Sweden, whose military spending is set to reach 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) by 2024. Finally integrated into NATO on March 7, the kingdom is pulling out all the stops to replenish its armaments stocks, after decades of disengagement. "We have placed orders for equipment, both in Sweden and abroad, for 19 billion krona in 2021, 36 billion in 2022 and 52 billion in 2023," said Göran Martensson, director of the Swedish Defense Materiel Administration (FMV). Exports have also risen by 18% in 2023, placing Sweden 13th in the world.

Saab was founded in 1937. "The company was formed on a handshake between the chairman of our board of directors at the time, Marcus Wallenberg [grandfather of the current president, whose family is still the group's majority shareholder], and the prime minister," said CEO Johansson.

SOFF director Limmergard: "Companies don't like me to say it, but in the late 1980s we had an Ikea-style arms industry. We had to produce high volumes, easy-to-understand and easy-to-use weapons that had to be functional and cheap. It was this tradition that enabled us to gain international market share and maintain a large industry, with companies that have since succeeded in specializing in niche markets, sometimes with the help of foreign investment."

The main bottleneck is the production line. It's impossible to increase deliveries of weapons and ammunition if suppliers don't keep up. For the Carl Gustafs, there are around 200 suppliers, some of whom have several customers, all of whom have increased their orders. This is the case, for example, with Norway's Nammo, one of Europe's largest ammunition manufacturers, with whom Saab has just signed an agreement. "We have jointly decided to develop our own warhead molding capacity. Meanwhile, they will be refocusing on artillery ammunition, which will give us greater production capacity together," said Höglund."

[weekendviking]

1800 Ghosts, and counting.

So, 1800 or so ghosts live in my brain. I put them there, not on purpose, but they lodged in my mind during the course of my daily work as I found them, checked, referenced, located and georeferenced their ends. Most are pretty quiet, and really only pop up when I do something that specifically reminds me of them. But some of them are quite active, and pop into my head whenever I pass near where they died or touch on some aspect of the subject of their death.

They all died in some sort of landslide, avalanche, debris flow or rockfall, both natural or anthropogenic. Some of them I know next to nothing about. Others of them I know how they died, graphically, medically accurate details in both time, place, physics and biology. At length. Some I stood nearby as they were exhumed. I Smelt them, I stood by as they took their last journey. I looked into the faces of those who had to find, pack, lift and move them. Very occasionally I have to talk to their families. I'm not good at that.

Some of them are close relatives and ancestors of mine, but most are not. They are just people, who were doing the things that just people do.

But having them there, and knowing their story, stories, makes me a bit twitchy. There are some areas of my country, towns, cities, mountains, farmlands, forests, rivers, that I can't be in without thinking of these ghosts. Some of them are so active in my head that certain streets, certain valleys or hills, make me so uncomfortable it feels like there's someone with a rifle focussed on me, just out of sight. Because I know how dangerous the geography is, and who died there, when, and how often. Often in graphic detail.

Most of the time I'm not close in to these ghosts unless there's a major emergency response, which I am part of. Most of the work is dry, digital, old documents, GIS software, geomorphology and weather and rainfall and rock strata and pore pressure and earthquake and clay and Gravity. Gravity.

I _Enjoy_ this work. I do it for public service, because it leads into maps, risks, hazards, fatality risks, etc, making things safer for people in the future. But it leaves ghosts in my head. So I'm a bit fucked up by it.

So I now look at the people who do this day in, day out, for our soulless social media landscape. The contracted mechanical turks behind the trust and security teams, the people who classify images and videos and media behind the term 'AI' (and what an ugly term that is, because there is not yet any AI worthy of the name), as it hoses through our social media feeds straight from warzones and every other zone where something awful happens, and think how much worse this is than what I do, for better money, shorter hours, and with actual recourse to professional medical help when I need it:

Outsourcing the hard bits to where it's cheaper, to where the jurisdiction is more lenient, to where it raises less waves, is not going to help anyone in the long run. It's abdication of our own humanity made possible by corporate structure.

[reasoningdaily]

Across a sterile white table in a windowless room, I’m introduced to a woman in her forties. She has a square jaw and blonde hair that has been pulled back from her face with a baby-blue scrunchie. “The girls call me Marmalade,” she says, inviting me to use her prison nickname. Early on a Wednesday morning, Marmalade is here, in a Finnish prison, to demonstrate a new type of prison labor.

The table is bare except for a small plastic bottle of water and an HP laptop. During three-hour shifts, for which she’s paid €1.54 ($1.67) an hour, the laptop is programmed to show Marmalade short chunks of text about real estate and then ask her yes or no questions about what she’s just read. One question asks: “is the previous paragraph referring to a real estate decision, rather than an application?”

“It’s a little boring,” Marmalade shrugs. She’s also not entirely sure of the purpose of this exercise. Maybe she is helping to create a customer service chatbot, she muses.

In fact, she is training a large language model owned by Metroc, a Finnish startup that has created a search engine designed to help construction companies find newly approved building projects. To do that, Metroc needs data labelers to help its models understand clues from news articles and municipality documents about upcoming building projects. The AI has to be able to tell the difference between a hospital project that has already commissioned an architect or a window fitter, for example, and projects that might still be hiring.

Around the world, millions of so-called “clickworkers” train artificial intelligence models, teaching machines the difference between pedestrians and palm trees, or what combination of words describe violence or sexual abuse. Usually these workers are stationed in the global south, where wages are cheap. OpenAI, for example, uses an outsourcing firm that employs clickworkers in Kenya, Uganda, and India. That arrangement works for American companies, operating in the world’s most widely spoken language, English. But there are not a lot of people in the global south who speak Finnish.

That’s why Metroc turned to prison labor. The company gets cheap, Finnish-speaking workers, while the prison system can offer inmates employment that, it says, prepares them for the digital world of work after their release. Using prisoners to train AI creates uneasy parallels with the kind of low-paid and sometimes exploitive labor that has often existed downstream in technology. But in Finland, the project has received widespread support.

“There's this global idea of what data labor is. And then there's what happens in Finland, which is very different if you look at it closely,” says Tuukka Lehtiniemi, a researcher at the University of Helsinki, who has been studying data labor in Finnish prisons.

For four months, Marmalade has lived here, in Hämeenlinna prison. The building is modern, with big windows. Colorful artwork tries to enforce a sense of cheeriness on otherwise empty corridors. If it wasn’t for the heavy gray security doors blocking every entry and exit, these rooms could easily belong to a particularly soulless school or university complex.

Finland might be famous for its open prisons—where inmates can work or study in nearby towns—but this is not one of them. Instead, Hämeenlinna is the country’s highest-security institution housing exclusively female inmates. Marmalade has been sentenced to six years. Under privacy rules set by the prison, WIRED is not able to publish Marmalade’s real name, exact age, or any other information that could be used to identify her. But in a country where prisoners serving life terms can apply to be released after 12 years, six years is a heavy sentence. And like the other 100 inmates who live here, she is not allowed to leave.

When Marmalade first arrived, she would watch the other women get up and go to work each morning: they could volunteer to clean, do laundry, or sew their own clothes. And for a six hour shift, they would receive roughly €6 ($6.50). But Marmalade couldn’t bear to take part. “I would find it very tiring,” she says. Instead she was spending long stretches of time in her cell. When a prison counselor suggested she try “AI work,” the short, three-hour shifts appealed to her, and the money was better than nothing. “Even though it’s not a lot, it’s better than staying in the cell,” she says” She’s only done three shifts so far, but already she feels a sense of achievement.

This is one of three Finnish prisons where inmates can volunteer to earn money through data labor. In each one, there are three laptops set up for inmates to take part in this AI work. There are no targets. Inmates are paid by the hour, not by their work’s speed or quality. In Hämeenlinna, around 20 inmates have tried it out, says Minna Inkinen, a prison work instructor, with cropped red hair, who sits alongside Marmalade as we talk. “Some definitely like it more than others”. When I arrive at the prison on a Wednesday morning, the sewing room is already busy. Inmates are huddled over sewing machines or conferring in pairs over mounds of fabric. But the small room where the AI work takes place is entirely empty until Marmalade arrives. There are only three inmates in total who regularly volunteer for AI shifts, Inkinen says, explaining that the other two are currently in court. “I would prefer to do it in a group,” says Marmalade, adding that she keeps the door open so she can chat with the people sewing next door, in between answering questions.

Those questions have been manually written in an office 100 kilometers south of the prison, in a slick Helsinki coworking space. Here, I meet Metroc’s tall and boyish founder and CEO, Jussi Virnala. He leads me to a stiflingly hot phone booth, past a row of indoor swings, a pool table, and a series of men in suits. It’s an exciting week, he explains, with a grin. The company has just announced a €2 million ($2.1 million) funding round which he plans to use to expand across the Nordics. The investors he spoke with were intrigued by the company’s connection to Finland’s prisons, he says. “Everyone was just interested in and excited about what an innovative way to do it,” says Virnala. “I think it’s been really valuable product-wise.”

It was Virnala’s idea to turn to the prisons for labor. The company needed native Finnish speakers to help improve its large language model’s understanding of the construction-specific language. But in a high-wage economy like Finland, finding those data laborers was difficult. The Finnish welfare system’s generous unemployment benefits leaves little incentive for Finns to sign up to low-wage clickwork platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. “Mechanical Turk didn’t have many Finnish-language workers,” says Virnala. At the same time, he adds, automatic translation tools are still no good at Finnish, a language with only 5 million native speakers.

When Virnala pitched his idea to Pia Puolakka, head of the Smart Prison Project at Finland’s prison and probation agency, she was instantly interested, she says. Before the pandemic, another Finnish tech company called Vainu had been using prisoners for data labor. But Vainu abruptly pulled out after a disagreement between cofounders prompted Tuomas Rasila, who had been in charge of the project, to leave the company.

By the time Virnala approached her with his proposal in 2022, Puolakka was eager to resurrect the AI work. Her job is to try and make the relationship between Finnish prisons and the internet more closely resemble the increasingly digital outside world. So far, she has been installing laptops in individual cells so inmates can browse a restricted list of websites and apply for permission to make video calls. She considers data labor just another part of that mission.

The aim is not to replace traditional prison labor, such as making road signs or gardening. It’s about giving prisoners more variety. Data labeling can only be done in three-hour shifts. “It might be tiring to do this eight hours a day, only this type of work,” she says, adding that it would be nice if inmates did the data labeling alongside other types of prison labor. “This type of work is the future, and if we want to prepare prisoners for life outside prison, a life without crime, these types of skills might be at least as important as the traditional work types that prisons provide,” she says.

But how much data labeling offers inmates skills that are transferable to work after prison is unclear. Tuomas Rasila, the now estranged cofounder of Vainu, who managed the prison project there for a year, admits he has no evidence of this; the project wasn’t running for long enough to collect it, he says. “I think asking people, who might feel outside of society, to train the most high-tech aspect of a modern society is an empowering idea.”

However, others consider this new form of prison labor part of a problematic rush for cheap labor that underpins the AI revolution. “The narrative that we are moving towards a fully automated society that is more convenient and more efficient tends to obscure the fact that there are actual human people powering a lot of these systems,” says Amos Toh, a senior researcher focusing on artificial intelligence at Human Rights Watch.

For Toh, the accelerating search for so-called clickworkers has created a trend where companies are increasingly turning to groups of people who have few other options: refugees, populations in countries gripped by economic crisis—and now prisoners.

“This dynamic is a deeply familiar one,” says Toh. “What we are seeing here is part of a broader phenomenon where the labor behind building tech is being outsourced to workers that toil in potentially exploitative working conditions.”

Toh is also skeptical about whether data labor can help inmates build digital skills. “There are many ways in which people in prison can advance themselves, like getting certificates and taking part in advanced education,” he says. “But I'm skeptical about whether doing data labeling for a company at one euro per hour will lead to meaningful advancement.” Hämeenlinna prison does offer inmates online courses in AI, but Marmalade sits blank-faced as staff try to explain its benefits.

Science

Your weekly roundup of the best stories on health care, the climate crisis, genetic engineering, robotics, space, and more. Delivered on Wednesdays.

By the time I meet Lehtiniemi, the researcher from Helsinki University, I’m feeling torn about the merits of the prison project. Traveling straight from the prison, where women worked for €1.54 an hour, to Metroc’s offices, where the company was celebrating a €2 million funding round, felt jarring. In a café, opposite the grand, domed Helsinki cathedral, Lehtiniemi patiently listens to me describe that feeling.

But Lehtiniemi’s own interviews with inmates have given him a different view—he’s generally positive about the project. On my point about pay disparity, he argues this is not an ordinary workforce in mainstream society. These people are in prison. “Comparing the money I get as a researcher and what the prisoner gets for their prison labor, it doesn't make sense,” he says. “The only negative thing I’ve heard has been that there’s not enough of this work. Only a few people can do it,” he says, referring to the limit of three laptops per prison.

“When we think about data labor, we tend to think about Mechanical Turk, people in the global south or the rural US,” he says. But for him, this is a distinct local version of data labor, which comes with a twist that benefits society. It’s giving prisoners cognitively stimulating work—compared to other prison labor options—while also representing the Finnish language in the AI revolution.

Without this kind of initiative, Lehtiniemi worries that non-English languages are being locked out of this next generation of technology. Smart speakers still struggle to understand Finnish dialects. “Not all Finnish people speak English very well, so there's a need for these local forms of data labeling as well,” Lehtiniemi says. Metroc isn’t the only company that has been forced to get creative about finding Finnish data labor. In 2011, the national library created a game to incentivize volunteers to help digitize its archive. In 2020, broadcaster YLE teamed up with Helsinki University and the state development company VAKE to ask volunteers to donate recordings of them speaking Finnish.

There is a sense in Finland that the prison project is just the beginning. Some are worried it could set a precedent that could introduce more controversial types of data labeling, like moderating violent content, to prisons. “Even if the data being labeled in Finland is uncontroversial right now, we have to think about the precedent it sets,” says Toh. “What stops companies from outsourcing data labeling of traumatic and unsavory content to people in prison, especially if they see this as an untapped labor pool?”

It's also not clear whether labor conditions in Finland's prisons—which famously focus on rehabilitation—could be replicated in other countries with a less progressive approach to justice. In the US, 76 percent of prisoners report that prison labor is mandatory, according to civil rights group, the ACLU. “The prison system in the United States is very, very different from what we have in Finland or Nordic countries. It's a completely different idea,” says Rasila. “In Finland, there is an exclusively positive feeling around the project because everyone knows that this is very voluntary.”

AI companies are only going to need more data labor, forcing them to keep seeking out increasingly unusual labor forces to keep pace. As Metroc plots its expansion across the Nordics and into languages other than Finnish, Virnala is considering whether to expand the prison labor project to other countries. “It’s something we need to explore,” he says.

[outsourcebigdata]

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APISCRAPY: AI driven web scraping & workflow automation platform APISCRAPY is an AI driven web scraping and automation platform that converts any web data into ready-to-use data. The platform is capable to extract data from websites, process data, automate workflows, classify data and integrate ready to consume data into database or deliver data in any desired format. 

AI-Labeler: AI augmented annotation & labeling solution AI-Labeler is an AI augmented data annotation platform that combines the power of artificial intelligence with in-person involvement to label, annotate and classify data, and allowing faster development of robust and accurate models.

AI-Data-Hub: On-demand data for building AI products & services On-demand AI data hub for curated data, pre-annotated data, pre-classified data, and allowing enterprises to obtain easily and efficiently, and exploit high-quality data for training and developing AI models.

PRICESCRAPY: AI enabled real-time pricing solution An AI and automation driven price solution that provides real time price monitoring, pricing analytics, and dynamic pricing for companies across the world. 

APIKART: AI driven data API solution hub  APIKART is a data API hub that allows businesses and developers to access and integrate large volume of data from various sources through APIs. It is a data solution hub for accessing data through APIs, allowing companies to leverage data, and integrate APIs into their systems and applications. 

Locations: USA: 1-30235 14656  Canada: +1 4378 370 063  India: +91 810 527 1615  Australia: +61 402 576 615 Email: Sales@aimleap.com

[itesservices]

Unlock the potential of AI models through four innovative approaches to automated data labeling. This method enhances accuracy and efficiency, enabling faster, reliable model development. Explore diverse strategies to streamline your data labeling process, from active learning to synthetic data generation. Embrace automation to drive advancements in AI capabilities, ensuring your models perform with precision and speed. Discover how these techniques can revolutionize your approach to data management and model training. 

[elevanaugustmedia]

What Are The Benefits Of White Label SEO?

An agency that offers SEO services to its clients under its own brand but, in reality, employs a third-party agency to fulfil the task is called a White Label SEO agency. This arrangement is effective in filling skill gaps, offering a wide range of services, and helping meet the client's demands. An SEO agency in Singapore often collaborates with businesses to help them achieve their SEO objectives. They can also act as your White Label SEO provider to help you offer required SEO services to your clients.

8 Benefits of White Label SEO

White Label SEO has its own merits. Let's discuss the various benefits of White Label SEO.

Expertise

SEO is not just limited to adding relevant keywords to your website content. It is much more than that. An SEO agency has in-depth knowledge of the critical ranking factors that help a piece of content rank high on SERP for relevant search queries. They can analyse a website and help develop strategies to boost its SERP rankings for relevant searches. As a White Label SEO provider, they can use their in-house team’s expertise to help you offer your clients the needed SEO services.

Use of software and tools

An SEO agency utilises various tools and technologies to offer various SEO services to its clients. If you lack the budget to invest in all the advanced SEO tools and technologies, you can collaborate with a White Label SEO provider. It will help you enjoy the benefits of using these tools and technologies without bearing additional expenses.

Helps save time

Outsourcing your SEO needs can save you time. All your SEO efforts are quite time-consuming, from developing strategies to creating SEO-optimised content to performing various link–building activities. As a result, consistent SEO efforts often take almost 6 months to show noticeable results on SERPs. When you outsource SEO services, it will help save time, which you can use to offer other marketing services to your clients or even acquire new clients.

Helps save money

Another benefit of outsourcing SEO services is that it helps you save the burden of hiring additional resources and the associated additional expenses.

Achieve scalable outcomes

Businesses prioritise improving SEO and growing their organic web traffic. Outsourcing SEO services to a White Label SEO provider helps you access a team of skilled SEO professionals that offers scalable results at an affordable price.

Avoid commitment

Another significant benefit of outsourcing SEO services is that it allows you the freedom to collaborate with the SEO team according to your client's needs without committing to fully employing them. As a result, if you are working with multiple clients, you will need to work with a comparatively larger team to provide effective services. In this regard, working with a White Label SEO provider is beneficial. Further, if the SEO needs lessen temporarily, you can utilise their fewer services without needing to commit to a larger team.

Reporting

Monitoring key SEO metrics is crucial to measure the performance of SEO efforts. Based on the results, SEO professionals make data-driven decisions to modify their strategies. Analysing different metrics and creating a comprehensive SEO report is quite time-consuming and requires a certain level of expertise. Partnering with a White Label SEO provider will relieve you from the duties of reporting. Instead, your White Label SEO provider will provide you with a detailed report to help you and your clients understand the impact of their SEO strategies. It will show details of analytics, keyword rankings, organic traffic, etc.

Consistency

Outsourcing SEO services ensure consistent SEO efforts that will help boost your client’s website ranking on SERP, drive more organic traffic, etc.

 Things to Consider When Partnering With a White Label SEO Provider

You need consistent SEO efforts to help boost a website's online presence, SERP rankings, and driving quality web traffic. Hence, when partnering with a White Label SEO provider, you must ensure they have skilled resources. Since you will be delivering their services under your brand name, the quality of their service will affect your reputation. Therefore, consider the following aspects when selecting an SEO agency as your White Label SEO provider.

Experience

When choosing your SEO partner, ensure they have the needed SEO skills, knowledge, and experience to take care of businesses across industries. It will allow them to develop customised strategies based on business and audience types to achieve noticeable results. Based on the expertise of these SEO agencies, you can approach businesses in various niches and offer them SEO services.

Fees

Fees are a critical aspect when selecting a White Label SEO provider. Since you will be adding a markup to your White Label SEO partner's fees, you need to ensure it should not amount to a price much higher than the average SEO market price. Compare their expertise, skills, experience and the fees they charge for their service. It will help you make an informed partnership decision.

Communication

Communication is a crucial aspect of a successful SEO partnership. With transparent communication between you and your outsourced SEO company, the latter will be clear about the expected deliverables and offer their services accordingly. In this regard, select a partner who will keep you updated about their efforts and the results they have achieved. Ensure they provide detailed SEO reports to help your client understand how well their website is performing on SERP.

Professionalism

When choosing a White Label SEO partner, ensure they are trustworthy and professional. A trusted White Label SEO will provide you with continued support throughout your partnership. In this way, if you or your clients have any concerns, they can address them and offer you needed solutions.

 Therefore, considering all these aspects can help you select the right White Label SEO partner. It further will help create opportunities for successful and long-term partnerships that you can utilise to expand your business. A trusted agency that offers quality SEO services in Singapore can help you and your clients achieve the desired SEO results.

[springbord-seo]

Why Outsourcing Can Help With Data Labeling Companies

The effectiveness of artificial intelligence and robotic process automation depends on the quality of training data. Data labeling, the process of assigning labels to data samples, is crucial for creating machine learning models that can learn from data. In this article, we discuss the importance of data labeling for companies and explore the benefits of outsourcing this task to specialists.

The Use of Data Labeling on Companies

Machine learning algorithms require labeled data and tags attached to raw data samples like visuals, sounds, and texts. Companies can enhance their decision-making processes using machine learning algorithms with better-trained models. When fed more data, a well-trained machine learning system can create more complex forecasting models.

The Importance of Outsourcing Data Labeling

High-quality data is essential for efficient machine learning models. Many businesses prefer to outsource the labeling of their data to specialists to reap the benefits of their machine-learning models. Outsourcing data labeling can save time and produce better results than in-house data labeling.

Comparing In-house, Crowdsourcing, and Outsourcing Data Labeling:

In-house data labeling involves employing data scientists and infrastructure within the organization. Crowdsourcing recruits regular people to perform tasks like labeling data. Outsourcing data labeling to specialists can be a better option due to the following reasons:

Required Time - Outsourcing data labeling is preferable to doing it in-house because it takes time to train a team and construct the infrastructure needed for data labeling. Crowdsourcing can also be slow due to the internet.

Price - Outsourcing produces better results than in-house data labeling because outsourcing firms spend less on technology and hire fewer data scientists to focus on the labeling process. However, crowdsourcing is more expensive than outsourcing.

Data Quality in Terms of Labeling - Outsourcing and in-house data labeling produce higher quality results than crowdsourcing because trained professionals are used. However, different outsourcing businesses may have varying degrees of expertise regarding data labeling.

Security - Outsourcing offers less security than in-house but more than crowdsourcing. Outsourcing organizations have certifications and various security procedures that lessen the likelihood of data exploitation.

Conclusion

Outsourcing data labeling can significantly reduce costs while still producing high-quality results. Professional firms like Springbord can safely outsource annotation work and complete complex, diverse projects of significant scale. Outsourcing data labeling provides businesses access to highly qualified workers, cutting-edge technology, and rigorous quality assurance procedures.

[suntec-ai]

Outsource Data Labeling Services https://www.suntec.ai/data-labeling-services.html As a leading data labeling consulting firm, Suntec AI has assisted numerous enterprises with diverse outsourcing requirements spanning various industries. To ensure consistent results, even in the face of diverse needs, we craft tailor-made workflows that are finely tuned to accommodate niche specifications. Explore more about our services at https://www.suntec.ai/data-labeling-services.html.

[makimacult]

But the success story is not one of Silicon Valley genius alone. In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan laborers earning less than $2 per hour, a TIME investigation has found.

The work was vital for OpenAI. ChatGPT’s predecessor, GPT-3, had already shown an impressive ability to string sentences together. But it was a difficult sell, as the app was also prone to blurting out violent, sexist and racist remarks. This is because the AI had been trained on hundreds of billions of words scraped from the internet—a vast repository of human language. That huge training dataset was the reason for GPT-3’s impressive linguistic capabilities, but was also perhaps its biggest curse. Since parts of the internet are replete with toxicity and bias, there was no easy way of purging those sections of the training data. Even a team of hundreds of humans would have taken decades to trawl through the enormous dataset manually. It was only by building an additional AI-powered safety mechanism that OpenAI would be able to rein in that harm, producing a chatbot suitable for everyday use.

To get those labels, OpenAI sent tens of thousands of snippets of text to an outsourcing firm in Kenya, beginning in November 2021. Much of that text appeared to have been pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self harm, and incest.

OpenAI’s outsourcing partner in Kenya was Sama, a San Francisco-based firm that employs workers in Kenya, Uganda and India to label data for Silicon Valley clients like Google, Meta and Microsoft. Sama markets itself as an “ethical AI” company and claims to have helped lift more than 50,000 people out of poverty.

The data labelers employed by Sama on behalf of OpenAI were paid a take-home wage of between around $1.32 and $2 per hour depending on seniority and performance. For this story, TIME reviewed hundreds of pages of internal Sama and OpenAI documents, including workers’ payslips, and interviewed four Sama employees who worked on the project. All the employees spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern for their livelihoods.

https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/