Despite being branded as autonomous and self-sustaining, artificial intelligence relies heavily on human labor — an army of data workers all over the world, primarily in the Global South. These workers “are purposely hidden by the companies that produce AI because they are the secret ingredient of AI itself,” says sociologist Antonio Casilli, the author of Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation and co-writer of the documentary In the Belly of AI. Casilli estimates that over 160 million people are involved in data work around the world.
There are the little hands, and there are also experts paid by AI companies to train AI to simulate themselves. This is how you get the good looking answers on complex coding questions for example. I received some emails asking me to teach my job to an AI…
Also it’s not stopping to text, there are now also learning with videos of workers asked to perform manual tasks with the goal to replace them with manual robots in the future. So you can imagine the mind numbing job of reviewing thousands of question and answers, but replace it with doing thousands of boring manual tasks in front of cameras for a shitty pay.