Miguel Afonso Caetano"AI tools have become ubiquitous, entering many facets of everyday life. More often than not, “artificial intelligence” models are presented as fully automated, having dispensed with the need for human intervention. The human workers who train, test, and maintain AI models and act as the first line of defense against model failures are made visible only occasionally. Media coverage sometimes emerges of hundreds of Indian workers1 who remotely ensure the checkout process goes smoothly while creating the illusion of automation at Amazon Go stores and African content moderators2 who make social media platforms safer at great personal cost. But these stories only scratch the surface of the labor that underpins every part of the AI production process.
Despite being touted as the definitive technological breakthrough of this century, the conditions under which AI models and tools are produced by data workers, in a highly opaque and fissured global supply chain, are still underexplored. Studies of data workers in the Global South have begun to fill gaps in knowledge about the low-paid outsourced labor behind AI, but less is known about U.S. data workers’ conditions.
In this report, we begin to address this gap through a study of the working conditions of U.S.-based data workers, conducted by AWU-CWA and TechEquity.These workers are essential to the development of tools and models developed by big tech companies, but are employed by complex webs of contractors in the U.S.-based sections of the global AI supply chain. Combining data from a survey of 160 data workers with insights from 15 in-depth interviews, we’ve found that the poor working conditions seen in the Global South are also widespread in data work in the U.S."
https://cwa-union.org/ghost-workers-ai-machine
#DataLabour #DataLabelling #DataAnnotation #BigTech #AI #GenerativeAI #WageSlavery
