There is so much talk about ChatGPT these days that you’d think the folks who make it run on a daily basis must be raking in the big bucks, right?

A contractor for OpenAI, the company that powers ChatGPT, said that most of the work behind the software is “grunt work” and said, “but there would be no AI language systems without it.”

The worker then added, “You can design all the neural networks you want, you can get all the researchers involved you want, but without labelers, you have no ChatGPT. You have nothing.”

So you think they’d be getting paid pretty well…

Think again!

The contractor who was previously quoted said that he makes $15 an hour for his “grunt work.”

He lives in Kansas City, Missouri, and said that his wage doing work for ChatGPT is $3 higher than Missouri’s minimum wage, but still…this news is pretty surprising.

The man added, “People sometimes minimize these necessary, laborious jobs. It’s the necessary, entry-level area of machine learning.”

Sonam Jindal of the non-profit research firm Partnership on AI, said, “A lot of the discourse around AI is very congratulatory. But we’re missing a big part of the story: that this is still hugely reliant on a large human workforce.”

AI isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, so we’ll see how this all shakes out!