The contractors are the invisible backend of the generative AI boom that’s hyped to change everything. Chatbots like Bard use computer intelligence to respond almost instantly to a range of queries spanning all of human knowledge and creativity. But to improve those responses so they can be reliably delivered again and again, tech companies rely on actual people who review the answers, provide feedback on mistakes and weed out any inklings of bias.
It’s an increasingly thankless job. Six current Google contract workers said that as the company entered a AI arms race with rival OpenAI over the past year, the size of their workload and complexity of their tasks increased. Without specific expertise, they were trusted to assess answers in subjects ranging from medication doses to state laws. Documents shared with Bloomberg show convoluted instructions that workers must apply to tasks with deadlines for auditing answers that can be as short as three minutes.
That’s the reality of “artificial intelligence” – the same reality it always seems to be in Silicon Valley: thousands and thousands of exploited workers behind the scenes running around like ants keeping the illusion of futurism alive for meager pay.
The same exploitation happens with chatGPT. This really needs to be brought to light, together with all the copyright infringement that must be happening to train these AIs
Thom Holwerda,
Indeed. It’s not really specific to AI. There are a lot of contract tech workers with few benefits and meager pay. That’s been the status quo for a while. However I believe the future with AI is going to be different and that most people are woefully unprepared to deal with impact that AI is going to have on their jobs. It’s going to take time and won’t happen over night, but the next decade AI will replace more and more jobs and I honestly don’t know where these redundant and educated workers are going to go. Education used to be the key to rise above the plight of factory workers, but now I fear that even they will struggle to compete against AI.
And to those who say AI creates new jobs, that’s true, but the value proposition of AI is that companies can remain productive with way fewer workers on the whole. The conditions will be very favorable for owners who just need AI and unfavorable for workers who’ve become expendable. I don’t know how we’re going to solve this as a society. If we don’t do anything, I worry we’ll become even more fragmented along the lines of extreme wealth versus extreme poverty.