'It's destroyed me completely': Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models

The images pop up in Mophat Okinyi's mind when he's alone, or when he's about to sleep. Okinyi, a former content moderator for Open AI's ChatGPT in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of four people in that role who have filed a petition to the Kenyan government calling for an investigation into what they describe as exploitative conditions for contractors reviewing the content that powers artificial intelligence programs. "It has really damaged my mental health," said Okinyi. The 27-year-old said he would would view up to 700 text passages a day, many depicting graphic sexual violence. He recalls he started avoiding people after having read texts about rapists and found himself projecting paranoid narratives on to people around him.