--:-- Shamita Basu: Good morning. It's Thursday, July 27th. I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: On today's show, the hidden human toll of developing chat GPT. A surprise result for the U.S. women at the World Cup. And how Paris cleaned up the River Seine so that Olympians and everyone can swim it in. But first, if you think you're suffering in the record temperatures sweeping the country right now, imagine having no air conditioning and no way to get relief.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's the reality for many incarcerated people and people who work in prisons. PBS recently asked people who served time in Texas to describe the conditions.
--:-- Incarcerated Person: I would say the heat was like being suffocated, like it took your breath away. I would be so hot that my vision would blur. I couldn't hear. I would flood the toilet and I would lay in about an inch of cold running water with my fan propped over me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's very easy to kind of give in to that oppressing heat and almost frankly forget to breathe.
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--:-- Shamita Basu: One woman incarcerated in Texas recently wrote an essay for PRISM about living in extreme heat. She has seen women harm themselves, trying to get transferred to the psychiatric unit because it has AC.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Texas has America's largest state prison system, and it's the second hottest state on average. Lawmakers there have failed to provide enough funding for the air conditioning prison's need.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of the most alarming situations is at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola. It's a notorious facility meant for adults, but it recently turned a death row building into a temporary youth jail.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A new court filing by the state's ACLU says Angola's conditions are inhumane, in part because kids are regularly held in hot jail cells with no air conditioning for days. The heat index in recent days has topped 125 degrees.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The heat is dangerous for corrections officers as well, who sometimes work for up to 14 hours wearing heavy gear. Prison officials say the extreme heat is making it harder to recruit and retain staff.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And shortages of officers can lead to additional safety and health issues for both workers and incarcerated people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Marshall Project reporter Maurice Shema told PBS about how these high temperatures can be deadly.
--:-- Maurice Shema: Often it is hard to pinpoint that a particular death is because of the heat, but we know that frequently the underlying cause, the sort of strain on the body that led to some of these deaths, comes from that summer heat.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A new study found for every 10 degrees, summer temperatures rise above the average. Deaths in prison rise by more than 5%.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Let's take a brief look now at some stories around the world. Ukraine is launching a major new push in their counteroffensive against Russia.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Ukrainian Defense Ministry says it's making progress in the southeast. The Washington Post spoke to a U.S. official who says this may not be the big move we've been expecting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This could just be Ukrainian troops setting up for a much larger attack.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Africa, there are new fears about stability, after soldiers in Niger released a video saying they've seized power from the country's president.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Countries in the region have been dealing with militant extremists. Niger was seen as relatively solid, a government that the U.S. and Europe have given large amounts of security assistance over the years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Moving to the World Cup, the U.S. women's team found themselves in an unusual place, trailing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Netherlands scored an early goal to take the lead. That meant the U.S. was behind at halftime for the first time in a World Cup match since 2011.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Team captain Lindsay Horan scored in the second half, so America had to settle for a 1-1 draw.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The result raises the stakes for the next match for Team USA against Portugal on Tuesday.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And tributes are pouring in from artists around the world following the death of Sinead O'Connor at 56.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Her hit song, Nothing Compares to You, made the Irish performer a global superstar in the early 90s.
--:-- Shamita Basu: O was also known for her activism tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in 1992.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At the time she was heavily criticized but many now see it as a brave move calling out child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church well before investigations revealed how widespread it was.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Many years later, she said she wasn't sorry she did it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Wall Street Journal is out with a new investigation about workers who played an important behind-the-scenes role in the launch of ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The company hired contractors in Kenya to screen text for offensive and obscene content, effectively acting as human shields to prevent chat GPT from spreading problematic content.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That means they had to repeatedly consume that content themselves about violence and abuse, and they say it was damaging to their mental health.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Contractors also say they were underpaid for the traumatizing work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Journal tech reporter Karen Howe told us about what they endured.
--:-- Karen Howe: Workers sort of had to sit at computers day in and day out and read text passages one by one with really very detailed descriptions of different types of violent and sexual content and self-harm content.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The contract budgeted $12.50 an hour for the job, but workers only got a few dollars an hour on average.
--:-- Shamita Basu: OpenAI told the journal that it wasn't aware of how low the pay was for contract workers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: When it comes to outsourcing within the tech industry, there is a really big draw to going to developing countries that are very low income and have high unemployment rates and therefore enable tech companies to kind of get away with paying very little amounts of money to workers to do really challenging work.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And Kenya has become a critical hub for this kind of work over the years because in addition to all the things that I just mentioned, it also speaks English because of its history of British colonization.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Howe says stories like these are a reminder that behind many popular social media and AI services, there are people, often in low-income countries, being exploited.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think there sort of a long history within the tech industry especially like the U centric tech industry the Silicon Valley tech industry where there sort of like an effort to conceal the hidden underbelly of what makes the internet clean for people like us.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In Kenya, workers are calling for the government to investigate OpenAI's labor practices and to enact new legislation to protect AI employees and content moderators.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We are now one year away from the 2024 Olympics in Paris, and some of the swim events will happen in the city's iconic river, the Seine.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Paris is in the midst of a years-long, billion-dollar cleanup. Pollution there was so bad that swimming was banned for a century.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the 1960s, the Seine was declared biologically dead, meaning it's too toxic for practically anything to live in.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But since Paris was tapped for the 2024 Games, the city ramped up efforts to make the river safe to swim for athletes and eventually the public.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Time magazine got an inside look at the operation earlier this year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One of the main problems to solve for is keeping sewage out of the Seine.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The solution now lies underground. Paris built a massive tank the size of 20 Olympic swimming pools to store rainwater during heavy storms.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That prevents it from overwhelming the sewage system, keeping the river cleaner.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The revival of the Seine is inspiring other cities that want to clean up their rivers, including Los Angeles, which is hosting the Summer Olympics in 2028.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's something that a lot of leaders talk about, but often it never happens.
--:-- Shamita Basu: As one river specialist puts it, the engineering of the Seine cleanup isn't unique. What is unique is Paris actually getting it done.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around. Coming up next as a narrated article is the Wall Street Journal's investigation into chat GPT workers that we talked about earlier.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So listen to that and I'll be back with the news tomorrow. Thank you.
