One-third of payments to contractors training AI systems used by companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have not been paid on time after the Australian company Appen moved to a new worker management platform.
Appen employs 1 million contractors who speak more than 500 languages and are based in 200 countries. They work to label photographs, text, audio and other data to improve AI systems used by the large tech companies and have been referred to as “ghost workers” – the unseen human labour involved in training systems people use every day.
↫ Josh Taylor at The Guardian
It’s crazy that if you peel back the layers on top of a lot of tools and features sold to us as “artificial intelligence”, you’ll quite often find underpaid workers doing the labour technology companies are telling us are done by computers running machine learning algorithms. The fact that so many of them are either deeply underpaid or, as in this case, not even paid at all, while companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI are raking in ungodly amounts of profits, is deeply disturbing. It’s deeply immoral on so many levels, and just adds to the uncomfortable feeling people have with “AI”.
Again I’d like to reiterate I’m not intrinsically opposed to the current crop of artificial intelligence tools – I just want these mega corporations to respect the rights of artists, and not use their works without permission to earn immense amounts of money. On top of that, I don’t think it should be legal for them to lie about how their tools really work under the hood, and the workers who really do the work claimed to be done by “AI” to be properly paid. Is any of that really too much to ask?
Fix these issues, and I’ll stop putting quotation marks around “AI”.
This dilemma is real. I think a lot of people are going to come to the realization that AI is bigger threat than they initially thought and they just weren’t ready to admit it. Many more are going to become affected over time.
Humans train other humans to replace themselves all of the time and we don’t really make a big deal about it. The difference with AI is not the fact that they are training their own replacements, but that AI replacement is more permanent and far more scalable than the humans they’re replacing.
I sympathize with those on the loosing end. AI allows corporations to be less reliant on humans. This bodes poorly for the working class. Historically though automation tends to win and those who got displaced have to find something else to. The problem is I don’t know what else they’re going to do? AI is going to continue eating into higher level jobs every year. This doesn’t mean AI has to do 100% of the job, but if it can be used to make existing employees more effective, that alone can result in huge job losses.
LOL – AI should be renamed IA – Insidiously Artificial.