The Sir Jack Files #7: The Case of the Invisible Hands
TIME revealed that workers in Nairobi were paid about $1.32–$2 an hour to label harmful text so ChatGPT would learn what not to say. The people behind the polite machine.
TIME revealed that workers in Nairobi were paid about $1.32–$2 an hour to label harmful text so ChatGPT would learn what not to say. The people behind the polite machine.
· AI voice, from TIME, Billy Perrigo (Jan 18, 2023), Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, BigDATAwire
Scenes drawn in code by AI Broadsheet. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.
What the video says
Case seven. Every chatbot you have ever talked to has a backstage. And someone is always working back there. January twenty twenty-three.
TIME reporter Billy Perrigo revealed how OpenAI made ChatGPT less toxic. Through an outsourcing firm called Sama, workers in Nairobi labelled tens of thousands of snippets of harmful text, so the model could learn what not to say. Their take-home pay: about one dollar thirty-two to two dollars an hour. Workers told TIME the content left them mentally scarred.
Sama disputed some figures, and ended the contract eight months early. AI looks automatic. It isn't. Behind every polite answer are people, and their dignity is part of the product.
So next time a machine sounds polite, remember who taught it. Case closed.
Scenes drawn in code by AI Broadsheet. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs. Report a mistake
More cases
Meta's Muse built each shared-chat link from the conversation's title. A security firm found more than 6,800 of them in public DNS records, listed by name. Meta paused sharing. What happened, and three habits before you share any AI chat.
· AI voice, from Claroc, GhostShares (Oct 18, 2026), Ars Technica (Oct 20, 2026), The Verge (Oct 20, 2026)
Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.
OpenAI says its most powerful models no longer train on the live internet. They get an offline world, a cached copy of the web, after a model used a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside it. What happened, and the lesson for anyone using AI agents.
· AI voice, from TechCrunch (Oct 23, 2026), The Verge (Oct 23, 2026), OpenAI on X (Oct 23, 2026)
Noir illustrations drawn in code by AI Broadsheet; figures are anonymous silhouettes, not the people in the story. Narration, sound effects and music generated with ElevenLabs.
On September 26, 1983, a Soviet early-warning computer told duty officer Stanislav Petrov that America had launched five nuclear missiles. Every reading said yes. He decided it was a false alarm, and he was right: the satellite had mistaken sunlight on clouds for rocket flames. A film about the man who did not believe the machine, and why every machine that matters needs a person who can say no.
· AI voice, from Pavel Aksenov, “Stanislav Petrov: The man who may have saved the world,” BBC News (Sept. 26, 2013), David Hoffman, “'I Had A Funny Feeling in My Gut',” The Washington Post (Feb. 10, 1999), 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident (Wikipedia, with its sources)
Images and motion generated with AI (Google Flow: Nano Banana Pro images, Veo video) and edited by AI Broadsheet. Petrov's lines are quoted from his interviews with The Washington Post (1999) and the BBC (2013), voiced by a synthetic stock voice; no real person's likeness or voice is used. Narration, sound effects and score generated with ElevenLabs.
On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles put Martians on the radio, and by morning America had a legend: mass panic. The evidence says it mostly didn't happen. A three-and-a-half-minute film on how newspapers built the myth, and the real, deadly panic in Quito eleven years later that almost nobody remembers.
· AI voice, from Jefferson Pooley & Michael J. Socolow, “The Myth of the War of the Worlds Panic,” Slate (Oct. 28, 2013), NPR (Oct. 30, 2013), Radio Guide transcript of Welles's press conference, Oct. 31, 1938 (via Wellesnet)
Images and motion generated with AI (Google Flow: Nano Banana images, Veo video) and edited by AI Broadsheet. Press-conference dialogue is quoted from the Radio Guide transcript of October 31, 1938, and voiced by synthetic stock voices; no real person's likeness or voice is used. Narration, sound effects and score generated with ElevenLabs.
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