ARTICLE: Why Silicon Valley’s biggest AI developers are hiring poets

[German Translator]

https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-developers-fiction-poetry-scale-ai-appen/

Silicon Valley’s biggest generative artificial intelligence developers are looking for a new kind of data worker: poets.

A string of job postings from high-profile training data companies, such as Scale AI and Appen, are recruiting poets, novelists, playwrights, or writers with a PhD or master’s degree. Dozens more seek general annotators with humanities degrees, or years of work experience in literary fields. The listings aren’t limited to English: Some are looking specifically for poets and fiction writers in Hindi and Japanese, as well as writers in languages less represented on the internet.

The companies say contractors will write short stories on a given topic to feed them into AI models. They will also use these workers to provide feedback on the literary quality of their current AI-generated text.

[Bill Hiatt]

It's good to see that some companies are using the work-for-hire model to generate training materials. This is the way it should always have been done.

[PJ Post]

To what end?

Also, wouldn't this increase selection bias within the data set?

[Bill Hiatt]

I suppose selection bias depends on who the developers hire and how they use them. I'm not sure how that would automatically increase selection bias.

With regard to the "To what end?" question, I'm not sure exactly what that refers to. But it's good to see AI companies using work-for-hire training materials rather than scraping protected materials.

[Hopscotch]

Assume Silicon Valley pays poets by the word per the tradmag payment system.  Recall when M-Twain wrote for the serials, he said he'd throw in three words where one well-chosen word would do in order to make more money.  I wonder - will starving poets give us a curiously verbose AI text style?  At least it would have some charm.