AI, as it currently exists, is terrible, devoid of much real value or use, and probably overall degrading our society (and definitely our climate). This is unlikely to change as the technology requires massive amounts of capital to train and run the models. Massive data centers that are an endless pit of energy, ghouls that want to use the technology for nefarious purposes such as extracting more wealth from you and I, to the extreme of facial recognition of "terrorist" suspects for drone strikes.
There is massive amounts of capital in this area, and other than the energy and equipment for running the models, another big cost for firms that develop LLMs is the need for training data that requires hundreds to thousands of people to generate manually. This is where you can potentially earn some decent remote money. There are caveats, and I by no means recommend this to anyone as a sole source of income. Work availability fluctuates week by week, the biggest company in this space is very evil, and you might end up spending a lot of time for very little benefit.
Your actual ability to earn depends mostly on your country of residence your level of education. In the USA, with a M.S. in Chemistry (they have never confirmed any of my education btw), I have been able to earn at most $60/hr, but more often $25-35/hr. The pay changes constantly because every project pays differently, and you will change projects very often, usually every week or two. I have also gone through a 2 month dry spell of having no/little work to do, which is why this is not something I would ever recommend as a source of income you rely on.
What is AI training and why should I care?
Specifically, AI training encompasses any work that involves creation or annotation of data that is fed back into an LLM model to improve it's capabilities. The data can be images, audio, video, and most commonly text. The specific task at hand can vary widely, but the most common involves rating various dimensions of the LLM's response and then improving the response.
How exactly is this used by a company? As a simple example, imagine that you are creating a service that uses an LLM to create recipes from a list of ingredients. First, you might download every cookbook and recipe that you can find by crawling the web, and feed that into the model. Unfortunately, the quality of the recipes might not be very well standardized, some transcription errors may have occurred, or you might have other specifications that you would like your model to follow. So you send those recipes, one-by-one, to thousands of people who will fix any errors, add additional context, and make sure that the recipes fit the specifications. Now this data set can be used to fine-tune the model and hopefully improve it by some measure.
Companies I have worked for
Scale Labs (Remotasks, Outlier)
Scale Labs is by far the largest company in this space, and is, at least up until recently, the de facto monopoly. It was founded by Alexandr Wang in 2016, after he dropped out from MIT at the age of 19. The company grew by setting up large centers (aka digital sweatshops) in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, paying the lowest possible wage for workers to annotate images from autonomous vehicles. Imagine sitting in a sweltering computer center, getting paid well below $1 an hour, to circle cones, pedestrians, vehicles, bikes, over and over again, with no job security - that is how this little psychotic dipshit become a billionaire at the age of 24. There are numerous articles out there about how bad this company is, and of course they are also the official AI partner of the DoD.
Scale runs two tasking platforms - Remotasks, and Outlier, the latter of which myself and @corgiwithalaptop have used. They seem focused on recruiting people with specific expertise, for a list of all fields you can look at their site (outlier.ai). Although I was hired as a "Chemistry Expert", most of my projects haven't involved Chemistry at all.
There are some major problems with this platform:
- You will have no tasks (empty queue, or EQ) for extended periods of time (sometimes weeks to months)
- "Training" is usually unpaid and extreme bullshit
- You need to do new training for each new project. The training documents are often vague or contradictory. You have to do graded quizzes and graded assessment tasks that you will fail, and never get feedback on why you failed. This is a very common experience, I once had a single week where I failed 4 assessments in a row, meaning I did 4 unpaid trainings for no reward.
- The platform itself is full of bugs and technical issues
- Once I was assigned to a project, but a bug prevented tasks from actually being allocated to me. The project's managers (queue managers, or QMs) told me that it is a bug that I would have to ask support about. By the time support got back to me over a week later, the project had wrapped up. I got assigned to a new project, and faced the exact same bug, which took another week to get fixed. This entire time, I am unable to do any work on the platform or make any money.
- If there is a technical issue that prevents you from completing a task, you will not get paid at all for the time you had already invested in the task.
- Every task gets reviewed and you are given a rating out of 5. Reviewers are just normal taskers that get promoted to reviewer willy-nilly (I have been a reviewer on many projects), and some reviewers are just god awful. They will straight up not understand your prompt, or not be familiar with some concept in the task, and give you a 1/5 for no reason. I have even been on projects where people were using an LLM to automatically complete the reviews, giving erroneous bad scores. If you get enough low scores, you can be removed from the project.
- Support is non-existent and useless. It takes days to weeks to get any response, and sometimes the response is just a canned response where you can tell they didn't actually read your ticket.
- They can remove you from the platform at any time for any reason, and anecdotally I have heard about this happening to people who did nothing wrong. There is no recourse if this happens to you, you can reach out to support but like I said, this is useless
Despite these problems, I am currently making money on the platform and will continue to do so as long as I can. For all of these reasons, I can not recommend outlier unless you have infinite spare time and really want a remote way to make money. If you have an expertise, especially coding/math, I think you might have a better chance of getting in and making good money. Recently, they have been promising to make changes to address these issues, but scale labs is ultimately an authoritarian employer that has no incentive to make their workers lives better, and only has incentive to increase the efficiency of labor extraction, so take that with a grain of salt. If you need income, I would not recommend wasting to much time on it or expecting anything out of it, but it might be worth a try.
Stellar AI
I have only been on this platform for about a week, and am only on one project so far, so I don't have much to say other then the following ways it is better than Scale's platforms:
- Training was much better. Instead of just reading a google doc, they walk you through exactly how to do a task within the tasking interface. It was also paid
- If there is a technical issue that prevents you from completing a task, they will still pay you for your time
My current project involves guiding the AI through navigating websites to get information to answer a prompt, for example, "what is the cheapest airline to fly to Hawaii," it is not all that difficult and the pay is $25/hr.
Conclusions
If you are good at writing-based work, and want remote ways to make money, and have plenty of spare time, it might be worth trying out these platforms. The worst case scenario is that you spend some time on it and ultimately reap no benefit, but there is a chance you get in and can successfully make decent money doing work that really isn't that difficult. The majority of the stress I have had is due to the Outlier platform itself.
If you have special expertise (any advanced degree, multiple languages, especially if you have coding experience) you might have better chances. Pay rates vary by country, so if you aren't based in the USA I am not sure what the earnings potential is.
@corgiwithalaptop also works for Outlier and they might be able to offer a different perspective. If you do decide you want to apply for Outlier, reach out to me or them and we can give a referral code - if you use my code and get the job and complete 10 hrs of work I would get $200, which I pledge to give $100 through the mutual aid comm here and the other $100 to my local mutual aid.
Cinnamon Pastrytarian