Employees describe the psychological trauma of reading and viewing graphic content, low pay and abrupt dismissals

Employees say they weren’t adequately warned about the brutality of some of the text and images they would be tasked with reviewing, and were offered no or inadequate psychological support. Workers were paid between $1.46 and $3.74 an hour, according to a Sama spokesperson.

They can leave the job but they will still carry the psychological scars from it. They were not receiving adequate mental health support for the severity of the content they had to deal with.

You comment inspired this thought: The older I get, the less I have faith in psychological support making us whole. I still think it should be part of work like this but the damage can be as permanent as losing a limb. What is that worth in money? (hypothetical)

That’s definitely something to consider. Psychological support helps people with coping but it doesn’t remove the trauma. Anyone willing to do this sort of work deserves to be very well compensated.

But all that said, it isn’t even unique to AI that there is a need for people to sift through the worst stuff imaginable to prevent everyone else from being exposed. All user-generated internet content has that problem.

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