Comment by rramadass

17 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46921505

As I've said, images can be horrific, and some people can be traumatized by them. That must not be dismissed.

However, It is also important to carefully and properly quantify these things and not sensationalize. You've linked a 50+ minute documentary, without comment, that seems to prove that one person hired to curate content can become traumatized by that process. I can't be certain that is what it is about, because I will not waste time watching documentaries (the vast majority of which are outright propaganda or incredibly biased, while pretending to be objective), but still, I've no doubt the general claim is true, since I never claimed or believed otherwise.

But you've not provided meaningful statistical or scientific evidence properly quantifying such harms in general.

  • You stated an opinion but i gave you hard data by pointing you to a documentary which you are refusing to watch. You have not even read the description for the video which gives you a ToC with timestamps to jump to for the major themes. I can point you to lots of relevant data on the web but the onus of educating yourself is on you.

    If you had just spent 5-10mins watching excerpts from above timestamps you would have seen interviews with workers doing such jobs from rural America/Canada/Spain/France/etc., sleazeball CEOs of sleazy companies taking these sort of contracts from Facebook/etc. and then farming it off to poorer parts of the World in Asia/Africa/South America/etc., psychologists who study and warn of the very real dangers of such a job etc.

    So before asking for more data, start with the one i have already given you. The psychological harm caused by repeated exposure to graphic imagery is well studied; AI image annotation is one subset of that.

    Here is a detailed article; The Ghosts in the Machine: Inside AI’s Hidden Human Trauma - https://www.thebrink.me/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-inside-ai-...

    • From the article you linked:

      "Some workers report nightmares in which the violent images they reviewed replay in gruesome loops. Others experience intrusive flashbacks while riding the bus or shopping for groceries. Over time, many describe a numbing of their emotions-a flattening of joy, sorrow, or empathy-because the only way to cope is to feel nothing at all."

      and bla bla bla. "Some", "Others", "many"... Wikipedia itself couldn't generate a better example of "weasel words". Like I said, we all know some people are traumatized, but all that matters is the amount. What if some is less than 1%? Less than 5%? More than 50%? The answer matters, but you are not providing answers to this.

      Also, learn to basic science. Anecdotes are not data.

      No, I am not watching a documentary for a collection of anecdotes, I clearly explained why documentaries don't count as serious sources of info when trying to accurately quantify things.

      EDIT: And if you really know that traumatization from images on computer screens is "well-studied", you can surely link to one to three of such studies, rather than lame documentaries telling cherry-picked sob-stories.

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