Some work for job safety.
Some work for promotion.
Some work for money.

Ghosts solve what others can't.

Same task. Different reasons.

#GhostWork #SilentOperators #PurposeDriven

I'm skeptical about the possibility of #AIConsciousness but appreciate that this work on "Taking #AIWelfare Seriously" is well meant

This paper acknowledges "At present, we lack the ability to fully care for the eight billion humans alive at any given time, to say nothing of the quintillions of other animals alive at any given time" although I'm not sure who are the "we" the authors refer to, the global North in general, perhaps?

If there's a possibility of AI consciousness, perhaps people training models should stop exposing algorithms to the worst of humanity through words, sounds and images?

But those wielding the most powerful AI can't look after the welfare of #DataWorkers in their own category of being who are alive today and doing their #piecework, faking automation and fixing algorithmic mistakes

Why is the #welfare of people alive today such a low priority?

#GhostWork
#TESCREAL

#RobertLong, #JeffSebo, #PatrickButlin, #KathleenFinlinson, #KyleFish, #JacquelineHarding, #JacobPfau, #ToniSims, #JonathanBirch, #DavidChalmers

https://arxiv.org/html/2411.00986v1

#AI #GenerativeAI #GhostWork #DataLabelling #WageSlavery: "To build AI, Silicon Valley’s most illustrious companies are fighting over the limited talent of computer scientists in their backyard, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to a newly minted Ph.D. But to train and deploy them using real-world data, these same companies have turned to the likes of Sama, and their veritable armies of low-wage workers with basic digital literacy, but no stable employment.

Sama isn’t the only service of its kind globally. Start-ups such as Scale AI, Appen, Hive Micro, iMerit and Mighty AI (now owned by Uber), and more traditional IT companies such as Accenture and Wipro are all part of this growing industry estimated to be worth $17bn by 2030.

Because of the sheer volume of data that AI companies need to be labelled, most start-ups outsource their services to lower-income countries where hundreds of workers like Ian and Benja are paid to sift and interpret data that trains AI systems."

https://lithub.com/how-vulnerable-low-wage-workers-power-ai-algorithms/

#AI #GenerativeAI #HumanInTheLoop #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":"

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

#AI #Automation #Work #GhostWork #Fauxtomation: "As anthropologist Lilly Irani observes, labor is not replaced by machines, it’s merely displaced. While stocks surge upon restructuring, few companies achieve this promise of savings and profitability, and “bullshit jobs” soar.

The story of AI distracts us from these familiar unpleasant scenes. Instead, we envision a glistening “future of work” in which we are all miraculously more efficient, our workplaces are populated with relentlessly pleasant robots, and expert automated agents fulfill our every command. Pundits talk loftily about the “ethics of AI” as if it’s a technical question of ironing out its biases or building BB-8 instead of The Terminator.

But the future of work is not a technology: it’s an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. “AI” is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs have already gone – offshore – and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots aren’t “taking our jobs” – people are.

We should be wise to the shiny veneer of new technologies and futuristic promises in pitches about “AI.” This is simply old wine in a new bottle. And as the Amazon case makes clear, it’s already turned to vinegar." https://www.techpolicy.press/dont-be-fooled-much-ai-is-just-outsourcing-redux/