This article is an interview with Richard Mathenge, a former contractor for Sama, an AI annotation service that worked with OpenAI training OpenAI’s GPT model by repeatedly viewing and categorizing explicit and offensive content.
He Helped Train ChatGPT. It Traumatized Him.
Richard Mathenge felt he’d landed the perfect role when he started training OpenAI’s GPT model in 2021. After years of working in customer service in Nairobi, Kenya, he was finally involved in something meaningful, with a future. Yet while promising, the position left him scarred. For nine hours per day, five days a week, Mathenge led a team that taught the model about explicit content, presumably to keep it away from us. Today, it remains stuck with them.