Research Notes: The Maintenance Class

Ground Zero

$12.50. That’s what OpenAI paid per hour for content moderation work, according to a TIME investigation. The workers doing the actual moderation in Kenya? They took home $1.32 to $2.00. That 6x to 9x markup wasn’t a typo or an outlier. It was the business model. And it raised a question that wouldn’t let go: if AI is supposed to be autonomous…