(actual picture of my dashboard and earnings. Don't pay attention to the accuracy scores they are actually not correct)
In my last post a few weeks ago I indicated that I have been spending a lot of my time working for a company doing AI training as remote work. This is one of the primary reasons I have not been on Hive as much. In the comments, there was a lot of interest in this.
I have been looking for remote jobs to increase my income and make $ in Ghana as we had one of the world's worst-performing currencies last year. Even though I had received a raise at the beach resort I manage this was soon gobbled up in inflation last year and I hardly felt it. I would also eventually like to leave this job to start some farming or homesteading and having a remote income could make this possible.
I had been applying for a lot of jobs on https://up2staff.com/ as I also have experience in project management, customer service, SEO/SEM, and WordPress development. I believe this job was advertised as a creative writing job and AI training. About a week after filling out the application I got an invite to join the project. I am a little fortunate in that I am a US citizen so this opens the doors to more jobs for me.
It was all very confusing at first the whole onboarding process. I had to create a Remotask account and this should have been the same email as my youtube account. But I made a mistake here and I used my professional email address I use for job applications. The primary mode of payment is either through Paypal or AirTm which can issue payments in several different ways including scril and bitcoin. Since I messed up my account creation I was trying to set up Paypal as payment with my secondary email address and this was not working. It took me a while to figure out that I had created a remotaks account years ago with my Paypal email and had that set up as payment in that account. I had to go undo this before I could set up the payment correctly for my new primary account.
Remotask is a platform that allows people to do microtasks and get paid for them. Usually, you have to do some training to get on board certain projects. You can walk in off the street create an account with Remotask and start their training on some projects they have loaded into the system. These include highway image annotation, transcription, and even LIDAR annotation. When you complete this training there is no guarantee that there will be tasks in your Queue and the ones that you can join from the remotask dashboard are pretty low paying. Remotask though is just the platform to deliver the work for the AI model training that I got invited to join externally.
The actual company providing the AI model training tasks is called ScaleAI they take on contracts from companies looking to improve their AI model responses and in this case with regards to certain Domains. I joined as an expert either in Travel and Transportation or Marketing and Sales. I had to show that I was an expert or had significant experience in these areas for my application. The starting pay was set at $25 an hour with unlimited hours. This all seemed good to me so I pressed on through the confusion to try to get onto this project.
In addition to joining Remotask, I had to install the Grammarly extension on Chrome and a word counter. The first task was to take an English proficiency exam to make sure I could understand and write well in English. Then I was instructed to write prompts or questions for the AI. These should be complex and provide the AI with some sort of role and define the output. Asking a simple question like Why is the sky blue would not cut it for this. After doing about 20 questions I was supposed to get a domain-specific test to take. I got one for travel and transportation and even though it seemed simple for me Remotask said I failed it.
This is where things got a bit more confusing. I was able to get on a Slack channel for the project though and then found that there were some open office call times with project leaders. I got on with one and they assured me not to worry about failing the test and assigned me to the Marketing and Sales domain. At this point the instructions changed in addition to working on Remotask I needed to also work on Google Crowd Compute workbench, and track my hours with Hubstaff. Each needed manual addition by the team leads. This took some back and forth and some figuring out before I had a project-specific Google account created for me and I had access to the Crowd Compute and also assigned access and a project on Hubstaff.
Now that I was officially on the project and I could track my hours I got to work. My goal was to work at least 10 hours a week this would give me $250 a week and $1000 a month. This is about 3 times what I make in my primary job in Ghana Cedis in Ghana. To do this I would work 2 hours a day usually at night after my wife and hopefully, my baby boy are asleep. The first week I did about 8 hours the task was to write complex prompts in my domain which was Marketing and Sales I had to write them in Crownd compute and then also copy and paste them into remotask. I would then either give the resulting response from the AI model a thumbs up or a thumbs down if it was helpful. I got my first payment of $190 the next week and that was enough to convince me it all was real.
Since then I have been changed back to Travel and Transportation. I think mainly because they had a shortage of writers in this domain. Tasks have changed each week throughout the project. One week we needed to re-write the responses. Another week we needed to evaluate prompts and responses already generated. Another week we had to do comparisons between two responses and rank which is better and provide critical feedback. Sometimes the work Queue would be empty which was frustrating when I would get on to work and there was no work to be done. But this has got much less common lately.
At one point they were asking for referrals and giving a $50 referral bonus I did not think of putting it out here because it was mainly targeted at US citizens but if another round of referrals comes up I will they did one limited-time referral drive where you and the person you refer will get a bonus of $250 after each of you make $150. Here is where they are looking at where people can live to work on this project:
English speakers in the following states and territories in the United States:
Alabama, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Guam, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming
In the last recruitment drive, I did have my business partner get on and he is from the UK he worked like the dickens pushing 40-hour weeks and making a couple of grand until Remotask required him to provide a US ID which he could not. He still as paid a few thousand $ before that happened though.
I earnestly got started in May and to date I have been paid $2800 so this is real there are some great incentives along the way also. As and when I see these jobs come up I will share them with the community and of course the next referral bonus.
In the last month I have also got promoted to a reviewer so I am now at times reviewing others works and getting paid $28 an hour now. From here I will continue to do this in the evening when I have time until I decide to leave my day job and then probably work from home doing this, working more on crypto projects like blurt again, and also my stock photography.
I am also keeping an eye out for remote Prompt Engineer jobs. I ran into one recently for $400,000 a year and they only wanted 3 months of ai experience and did not require a computer science background. I did not apply for this job though because my values did not align with the company and the model they were trying to create. In the meantime I will work on getting some additional education into Large Language Models, and how they work. I have also got my Google certification in Digital Marketing and will look at adding to those credentials. In the next year if all goes well I should have a sufficient online income that would allow me to work remotely and homestead here in Ghana and travel some of the year.
Please feel free to ask any questions and I will do my best to answer them.