AI is running into a data dilemma, and it needs your help.
Technically, it doesn’t need your help. It just needs your emails, your internal messages with coworkers, and any documents you created.
Consider this the newest stage of the great education of AI.
AI companies have run the well dry training their models with internet text and people rating their chatbot responses. Now they want AI to get hands-on job experience, and they’re doing it with simulated workplaces.
(Alistair Barr, author of the great Tech Memo newsletter, has a fantastic breakdown on how these reinforcement learning environments work.)
These training grounds need real data and workflows that models can study.
AI companies can leverage their own workforces for that. Elon Musk recently told SpaceX workers their data will be used to train Grok. “It will inherit your thoughts and ideas,” is a totally normal thing Musk said at a recent all-hands meeting.
But some employees don’t take kindly to their mouse movements and keystrokes being used for AI training. (See: Meta.)
Which brings us to Google. The tech giant just paid $10 million for corporate data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines. And it wasn’t alone. AI training startup Mercor also bid $7.5 million for the info.
It’s an important reminder, lawyers told BI, that your work data isn’t as private as you might think.
If AI companies are in the market for work-related data, are you selling yours?
That’s the question Handshake AI is asking. The AI training firm is offering up to $30,000 for “high-quality written documents.”
The request raises plenty of compliance questions. (Handshake AI stipulated that you must own the documents and be authorized to share them.)
But setting aside the legality of it all, the pitch brings up an interesting debate about how much you value your work-related data in the AI era.
Last year, when Meta was paying people to smile on camera, I posed a similar question: What’s your price for training AI models on something you’re highly skilled at?
The results were split. Some were willing to accept as little as $25 an hour. Others outright refused to do it.
Handing over some data is a lot easier than spending hours training a model. But AI has made a lot of progress over the past year, potentially giving people pause.
You also need to factor in what others might do. Just because you choose to shun AI over fears it’ll eventually automate your job away doesn’t mean your colleague will make the same choice.
So, I’ll ask again, are you selling? And if so, what’s your price?
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