
Inmates in Finland are training AI as part of prison labor - cpeterso
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/28/18285572/prison-labor-finland-artificial-intelligence-data-tagging-vainu
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29ssyg
Why should I be outraged at this? How is this much worse than any other prison
job?

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randon
exactly, the only outrage is them being paid and not using that money to help
the victims of their actions

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coldtea
Depriving them of pay is not required. They are still humans themselves, and
they're paying for their actions with prison term.

Societies that confuse prison with vengeance have more crime, and end up worse
for victims themselves.

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randon
not true, even in feudal times there were less crimes because of harsher
punishments, even in much harder times, i don't think that prisoners should be
abused by the way while in jail also (and this happens mostly by other
prisoners as well) that should be strictly prohibited

~~~
madrix999
Sounds like you're pulling stuff from out of your ass, the truth here is
corrective vs punitive, corrective leads to a lot less recidivism, unlike
punitive. All you have to look at is recidivism rates in the US vs northern
European countries that have corrective prison systems in place. Norway has a
20% recidivism rate compared to the US's 67.8% withing 3 years, and 76.6%
within 5 years.

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jnty
Good intent from the labellers isn't always _required_ for a good model but it
certainly helps, especially if the model training process is unsophisticated.
I'm sceptical enough of this being the case for poorly-paid annotators -
surely for prisoners it could be even worse?

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lm28469
If we trust for profit private prisons to fight wildfires I don't see why we
wouldn't trust them for other things.

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/california-is-paying-
inmates...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/14/california-is-paying-inmates-1-an-
hour-to-fight-wildfires.html)

~~~
coldtea
> _for profit private prisons_

Who trusts "for profit private prisons"? Other than "libertarians" and people
making money off of running them?

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colejohnson66
What is with people and thinking all libertarians are idiots? I’m liberatarian
and I despise for profit prisons. They have perverse incentives

~~~
jtr1
Not sure where you're writing from, but there's some muddying of the term in
the US. While libertarianism outside the US has roots in anarchist anti-
authoritarianism, in the US, right-wing libertarianism has a bit of a
reputation for using anti-statist language to advocate for stripping away any
kind of limitations on capitalist enterprise, regardless the incentives.

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benj111
Its getting so hard to spot the April Fools day stories.

After reading, I'm guessing this isn't one of them.

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ahje
It is not a hoax/joke.

For the record, the article is older than that. The CSA press release is over
two weeks old.

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benj111
I know. I was scanning the front page for likely fools day stories, and this
seemed the most likely.

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MrZongle2
Unconventional, but as a means to fill a "Mechanical Turk gap" it seems like a
fine approach as the results can be isolated and tested. Inmates read and
summarize with the benefit of being paid (and perhaps learning something in
the process based upon the material read), Vainu gets a training set.

That said, the headline just begs for a "Alexa, shank the snitch" kind of
joke.

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pjc50
As I've been saying, the "AI threat" is not that it'll autonomously decide to
hate humans but that it will, under the control and guidance of actual humans,
be used for anti-human purposes.

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AJ007
The major, implemented, commercial use cases for AI have so far been anti-
human:

\- Youtube's deep learning recommendation engine. Thanks to Guillaume Chaslot
for publicly stating what I suspected was going on at Google
[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/technology/youtube-
conspi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/technology/youtube-conspiracy-
stars.html)

\- Google, Facebook, etc use of machine learning for advertising optimization.

\- Presumable widespread use of facial recognition cameras in China (an area I
don't know a lot about.)

How are we supposed to expect the leaders in AI to perform ethically in the
future, or today, when their first foray in to machine learning
commercialization has been sloppy and ethics-free?

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MisterTea
> How are we supposed to expect the leaders in AI to perform ethically in the
> future, or today, when their first foray in to machine learning
> commercialization has been sloppy and ethics-free?

Remove the billions and billions of dollars in profit to be reaped from making
humans obsolete.

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mtw
I hope they're not asked to label if specific actions are morally correct or
not :)

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tw1010
That's a stereotyped characterization of why people go to prison that HN
should be wise enough not to propagate.

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maxaf
Alright, I’ll bite. Are you saying that most inmates are serving time for
alleged violations of law that have not actually occurred?

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mj_olnir
Not OP, but just because you've broken the law once doesn't mean you're a bad
person, much less lack moral agency.

People make mistakes. Sure, some deserve to rot in prison for irredeemable
crimes, but many (at least, in my context as an American citizen) are there
for nonviolent drug offenses or failing to pay fines.

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SilasX
That's irrelevant. All that the OP's point requires is that, on average, the
moral choices of such people are worse. The existence of outliers -- or even
common exceptions -- does not refute that.

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Faaak
You break a lot of laws every morning while driving to work; doesn't mean your
moral choices on average are worse than someone else.

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SilasX
My frequency of lawbreaking would indeed (anti-)correlate with the quality of
moral decisionmaking, and my frequency of lawbreaking is likely lower than
those who have been convicted (at least if severity-weighted).

Further, the comparison was against convicts, who do it frequently and
severely enough that someone finds it worth the money to prosecute and get a
conviction. And at that point, yes, a correlation appears.

You're still making the same fallacy: "I can find an exception, so the
correlation doesn't hold." That doesn't follow.

(And, FWIW, I don't drive to work.)

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abledon
Anyone use VOTT for labelling training data? Man that is just a joy to use
compared to labelImg, especially the template stamp feature and label hotkey.

~~~
king_magic
I gave up on VOTT, ended up going with RectLabel on macOS. IMO better
workflow, and being able to copy and paste annotations from one image to
another (to then go fine tune them) blows both VOTT and labelImg our of the
water.

~~~
visarga
I checked VoTT and RectLabel and they seem to be desktop apps. Can they be
used by a tagging team (more than one person), especially if some of the
taggers work from home?

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king_magic
Not really, which is another big problem for all of them (including
RectLabel). No great solutions all around :(

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torpilla
Skynet labor camps

~~~
rishabhd
My thoughts, exactly. Or even like The Matrix where humans are farmed for
energy. Here, they are farmed for their mind to train the next AI, which might
in a worst case scenario rule them someday. Somehow reminds me of this
beautiful piece [1] by Maciej Cegłowski .

[1]
[https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm](https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm)

~~~
ben_w
I once found what looked like an early draft of The Matrix. Instead of body
heat being used for power, part of each enslaved human’s brain was used as an
organic supercomputer to _control_ the fusion reactors.

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misnome
The story goes that the studio executives wanted it changed to energy because
they thought that viewers wouldn't understand using brains for computing
power. Hard references to this fact are hard to find, though
[https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-
executiv...](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executive-
meddling-the-cause-of-humans-as-batteries-in-the-matrix) seems to collect a
couple of secondary sources.

~~~
jnurmine
Strange that viewers would struggle to understand using captive brains for
computing power, but would have no problems with a whole lot of other concepts
from the movie...

Then again, the plot is the usual Hero's Journey (Campbell) like the majority
of Hollywood blockbusters tends to be, but I guess the devil is in the details
(illusory matrix/maya, recursive resurrection/enlightenment of Neo, the
Christian theme of consuming an apple (pill) from the tree of knowledge and
the subsequent expulsion from "paradise", etc.)

The Matrix trilogy is good on many levels, but I can't buy the "people used as
batteries is easier to understand than people as compute accelerators". There
are plenty of other, perhaps more relevant, places to dumben down in the
Matrix if one goes down that road.

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busfahrer
This is a LitRPG novel waiting to happen

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Chris2048
What could go wrong?

~~~
paganel
Last week there were the poor women in India who were making a living out of
labeling data, now it’s the inmates in Finland, I wonder who will be next?
Will we have to boycott the likes of Google or FB for how the label their data
the same way some people used to boycott clothes made in Bangladesh?

~~~
radarsat1
> poor women in India who were making a living out of labeling data

Is there something unethical about hiring people to label data?

> now it’s the inmates in Finland

Forced labour in general is always up for debate, but is there something about
labeling data that is inherently worse than other forms of prison labour, such
that tech companies deserve a boycott?

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denzil_correa
> Is there something unethical about hiring people to label data?

Inherently, no. The question I'd ask is - if labeled data is so important,
would we pay them equitable benefits of the outcomes we achieve after the
usage of this data? Or, do we simply fire them once they fuel our algorithms.
It reminds me of "blood diamond" like practices.

~~~
gus_massa
Screws are also very important, I imagine millions and millions of IKEA
furniture falling downs if screws disappear magically. More seriously, for
some structures it's much better and easy to use screws than nails. (Nails are
very important too.) Anyway, I don't imagine that the operators in a screw or
nail factory are getting payed millions per year.

There are hundred of economy books explaining how much you get paid, with
different theories and interpretations, but if you can be replaced by a person
that will do your work a minimal wage, you will probably get only a minimal
wage.

Also, each label of the data is not so valuable, some are wrong, some are
unclear, you must aggregate and process millions of labels. Imagine how little
value they do get for each Captcha reply.

> _Or, do we simply fire them once they fuel our algorithms._

Most works are like this. Imagine you are the main architect/engineer in
charge of building the Empire State Building. They pay you for a few year to
do the plans of the building, hiring the workers, buying the materials,
whatever is necessary to do. After the building if finished, they thank you
and now you are unemployed. (The workers are unemployed too.) You don't get a
cut of the profits of the building.

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viach
So they'll get AI with criminal mindset as a result? See where it leads to?

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astrea
They were classifying news articles. How could that possibly have a "criminal
mindset"?

