Communications of the ACM
Behind the AI Boom, an Army of Overseas Workers in 'Digital Sweatshops'
Much of the debate over AI has focused so far on its propensity for bias and potential to go rogue or be abused, but companies producing AI technology are also charting a new frontier in labor exploitation, researchers say.
Credit: Martin San Diego/The Washington Post
In a coastal city in the southern Philippines, thousands of young workers log online every day to support the booming business of artificial intelligence.
In dingy Internet cafes, jam-packed office spaces or at home, they annotate the masses of data that American companies need to train their artificial intelligence models. The workers differentiate pedestrians from palm trees in videos used to develop the algorithms for automated driving; they label images so AI can generate representations of politicians and celebrities; they edit chunks of text to ensure language models like ChatGPT don't churn out gibberish.
More than 2 million people in the Philippines perform this type of "crowdwork," according to informal government estimates, as part of AI's vast underbelly. While AI is often thought of as human-free machine learning, the technology actually relies on the labor-intensive efforts of a workforce spread across much of the Global South and often subject to exploitation.
The mathematical models underpinning AI tools get smarter by analyzing large data sets, which need to be accurate, precise and legible to be useful. Low-quality data yields low-quality AI. So click by click, a largely unregulated army of humans is transforming the raw data into AI feedstock.
In the Philippines, one of the world's biggest destinations for outsourced digital work, former employees say that at least 10,000 of these workers do this labor on a platform called Remotasks, which is owned by the $7-billion San Francisco start-up Scale AI.
From The Washington Post
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