World, meet Alex, Bill, and Mophat, three workers whose labor was essential to filtering violence and abuse out of ChatGPT. For the first time they’re ready to tell you who they are—and how the work unraveled their lives and their families.

Alex, Bill, Mophat and around 50 colleagues in Kenya spent 5 months reviewing day in and day out thousands of text passages of extreme violence, sexual abuse and self-harm. Their job was to label each one to teach an AI filter how to get rid of this content.

That filter was ultimately used for ChatGPT—and became foundational to its virality. Anytime someone tries to prompt ChatGPT to produce a rape fantasy or suicide scenario, and it refuses? That's Alex, Bill, and Mophat's work helping keep tens of millions of users safe.

But the work seriously cost them and many of their coworkers. They were reading about scenarios that were previously unimaginable. It haunted their minds and eroded their sanity. More than a year later, they suffer anxiety, depression, insomnia. They've lost touch with family.

This work isn't an anomaly: It is a feature of generative AI systems. Just as with content moderation on FB or TikTok, researchers told me that as the abuses of ChatGPT and other AI grow, so will the demands for this work. Alex, Mophat, Bill's stories are only the beginning.

This story builds on the critical reporting of @billyperrigo who was first to reveal that OpenAI hired workers in Kenya to perform this kind of work. At the time the workers weren't ready to go on the record. Now they want you to hear their voice.

Part of the reason they're ready to come forward? Alex, Bill, Mophat, and their colleague Richard today filed a petition with the Kenyan parliament to demand LEGISLATIVE change. With their lawyer Mercy Mutemi & @Foxglovelegal, they're urging regulation of the AI labor industry.

That doesn't mean going public is without risk. Many other workers were too afraid to speak with me or go on the record for fear of losing their jobs and being unemployable. In Kenya, where jobs are hard to come by, this can be paralyzing.

I'm immensely grateful that Alex, Mophat, Bill, and Richard let me into their homes, and let me spend a week with their families and communities in Nairobi, to help me understand everything they went through.

They hope that by sharing these stories, it can help spark a movement within the AI & data annotation industries to seriously think about how to protect workers like them, so neither workers in Kenya nor tens of thousands of others around the world have to face this trauma.

Huge thank you to @annieminoff, the host of this episode, the entire podcast team, my collaborator @dseetharaman, and my editors who sent me to Kenya on the faith that I'd find these workers and they'd be willing to talk. Here's the full episode again.

The petition that Alex, Bill, Mophat, and Richard filed. 👇