"Poor" in California means earning $80k/year, so they probably are not doing that. Africa / Indonesia / Philippines are better places to find English speaking RLHF workers.

Yes, this precisely it. There isn't going to be hard evidence to prove it though. Survey data that underpins some empirical studies have similar transparency issues too. This is far from a new problem.

If you adjust your mindset slightly when searching online, it's not hard to find communities of people looking for quick side work and this was huge during the covid lockdown era. There were people helping train LLMs for all kinds of purposes from education to customer service. Those startups quickly cashed out a few years ago and sold to the big players we have now.

I don't get why this is hard for people to believe (or remember)?