The Exploited Labor

Behind Artificial
Intelligence
Supporting transnational worker
organizing should be at the center of the
fight for “ethical AI.”

Nash Weerasekera for Noema Magazine

Essay Technology & the Human

By Adrienne Williams, Milagros Miceli and Timnit Gebru

OCTOBER 13, 2022

Adrienne Williams and Milagros Miceli are researchers at the Distributed AI Research
(DAIR) Institute. Timnit Gebru is the institute’s founder and executive director. She
was previously co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google.

The public’s understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely shaped by

pop culture — by blockbuster movies like “The Terminator” and their
doomsday scenarios of machines going rogue and destroying humanity. This
kind of AI narrative is also what grabs the attention of news outlets: a Google
engineer claiming that its chatbot was sentient was among the most discussed
AI-related news in recent months, even reaching Stephen Colbert’s millions of
viewers. But the idea of superintelligent machines with their own agency and
decision-making power is not only far from reality — it distracts us from the
real risks to human lives surrounding the development and deployment of AI
systems. While the public is distracted by the specter of nonexistent sentient
machines, an army of precarized workers stands behind the supposed
accomplishments of artificial intelligence systems today.

Many of these systems are developed by multinational corporations located in

Silicon Valley, which have been consolidating power at a scale that, journalist
Gideon Lewis-Kraus notes, is likely unprecedented in human history. They are
striving to create autonomous systems that can one day perform all of the tasks
that people can do and more, without the required salaries, benefits or other
costs associated with employing humans. While this corporate executives’
utopia is far from reality, the march to attempt its realization has created a
global underclass, performing what anthropologist Mary L. Gray and
computational social scientist Siddharth Suri call ghost work: the downplayed
human labor driving “AI”.

Tech companies that have branded themselves “AI first” depend on heavily
surveilled gig workers like data labelers, delivery drivers and content
moderators. Startups are even hiring people to impersonate AI systems like
chatbots, due to the pressure by venture capitalists to incorporate so-called AI
into their products. In fact, London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures
surveyed 2,830 AI startups in the EU and found that 40% of them didn’t use
AI in a meaningful way.

Far from the sophisticated, sentient machines portrayed in media and pop
culture, so-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers
around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor
conditions. And unlike the “AI researchers” paid six-figure salaries in Silicon
Valley corporations, these exploited workers are often recruited out of
impoverished populations and paid as little as $1.46/hour after tax. Yet despite
this, labor exploitation is not central to the discourse surrounding the ethical
development and deployment of AI systems. In this article, we give examples
of the labor exploitation driving so-called AI systems and argue that
supporting transnational worker organizing efforts should be a priority in
discussions pertaining to AI ethics.

We write this as people intimately connected to AI-related work. Adrienne is a

former Amazon delivery driver and organizer who has experienced the harms
of surveillance and unrealistic quotas established by automated systems.
Milagros is a researcher who has worked closely with data workers, especially
data annotators in Syria, Bulgaria and Argentina. And Timnit is a researcher
who has faced retaliation for uncovering and communicating the harms of AI
systems.

Treating Workers Like Machines

Much of what is currently described as AI is a system based on statistical
machine learning, and more specifically, deep learning via artificial neural
networks, a methodology that requires enormous amounts of data to “learn”
from. But around 15 years ago, before the proliferation of gig work, deep
learning systems were considered merely an academic curiosity, confined to a
few interested researchers.

In 2009, however, Jia Deng and his collaborators released the ImageNet
dataset, the largest labeled image dataset at the time, consisting of images
scraped from the internet and labeled through Amazon’s newly introduced
Mechanical Turk platform. Amazon Mechanical Turk, with the motto “artificial
artificial intelligence,” popularized the phenomenon of “crowd work”: large
volumes of time-consuming work broken down into smaller tasks that can
quickly be completed by millions of people around the world. With the
introduction of Mechanical Turk, intractable tasks were suddenly made
feasible; for example, hand-labeling one million images could be automatically
executed by a thousand anonymous people working in parallel, each labeling
only a thousand images. What’s more, it was at a price even a university could
afford: crowdworkers were paid per task completed, which could amount to
merely a few cents.

“So-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers

around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious
labor conditions.”

The ImageNet dataset was followed by the ImageNet Large Scale Visual
Recognition Challenge, where researchers used the dataset to train and test
models performing a variety of tasks like image recognition: annotating an
image with the type of object in the image, such as a tree or a cat. While non-
deep-learning-based models performed these tasks with the highest accuracy
at the time, in 2012, a deep-learning-based architecture informally dubbed
AlexNet scored higher than all other models by a wide margin. This catapulted
deep-learning-based models into the mainstream, and brought us to today,
where models requiring lots of data, labeled by low-wage gig workers around
the world, are proliferated by multinational corporations. In addition to
labeling data scraped from the internet, some jobs have gig workers supply the
data itself, requiring them to upload selfies, pictures of friends and family or
images of the objects around them.

Unlike in 2009, when the main crowdworking platform was Amazon’s

Mechanical Turk, there is currently an explosion of data labeling companies.
These companies are raising tens to hundreds of millions in venture capital
funding while the data labelers have been estimated to make an average of
$1.77 per task. Data labeling interfaces have evolved to treat crowdworkers like
machines, often prescribing them highly repetitive tasks, surveilling their
movements and punishing deviation through automated tools. Today, far from
an academic challenge, large corporations claiming to be “AI first” are fueled
by this army of underpaid gig workers, such as data laborers, content
moderators, warehouse workers and delivery drivers.

Content moderators, for example, are responsible for finding and flagging
content deemed inappropriate for a given platform. Not only are they essential
workers, without whom social media platforms would be completely unusable,
their work flagging different types of content is also used to train automated
systems aiming to flag texts and imagery containing hate speech, fake news,
violence or other types of content that violates platforms’ policies. In spite of
the crucial role that content moderators play in both keeping online
communities safe and training AI systems, they are often paid miserable wages
while working for tech giants and forced to perform traumatic tasks while
being closely surveilled.

Every murder, suicide, sexual assault or child abuse video that does not make
it onto a platform has been viewed and flagged by a content moderator or an
automated system trained by data most likely supplied by a content
moderator. Employees performing these tasks suffer from anxiety, depression
and post-traumatic stress disorder due to constant exposure to this horrific
content.

Besides experiencing a traumatic work environment with nonexistent or

insufficient mental health support, these workers are monitored and punished
if they deviate from their prescribed repetitive tasks. For instance, Sama
content moderators contracted by Meta in Kenya are monitored through
surveillance software to ensure that they make decisions about violence in
videos within 50 seconds, regardless of the length of the video or how
disturbing it is. Some content moderators fear that failure to do so could result
in termination after a few violations. “Through its prioritization of speed and
efficiency above all else,” Time Magazine reported, “this policy might explain
why videos containing hate speech and incitement to violence have remained
on Facebook’s platform in Ethiopia.”

Similar to social media platforms which would not function without content
moderators, e-commerce conglomerates like Amazon are run by armies of
warehouse workers and delivery drivers, among others. Like content
moderators, these workers both keep the platforms functional and supply data
for AI systems that Amazon may one day use to replace them: robots that stock
packages in warehouses and self-driving cars that deliver these packages to
customers. In the meantime, these workers must perform repetitive tasks
under the pressure of constant surveillance — tasks that, at times, put their
lives at risk and often result in serious musculoskeletal injuries.

“Data labeling interfaces have evolved to treat crowdworkers like

machines, often prescribing them highly repetitive tasks, surveilling
their movements and punishing deviation through automated
tools.”

Amazon warehouse employees are tracked via cameras and their inventory
scanners, and their performance is measured against the times managers
determine every task should take, based on aggregate data from everyone
working at the same facility. Time away from their assigned tasks is tracked
and used to discipline workers.

Read Noema in print.

Like warehouse workers, Amazon delivery drivers are also monitored through
automated surveillance systems: an app called Mentor tallies scores based on
so-called violations. Amazon’s unrealistic delivery time expectations push
many drivers to take risky measures to ensure that they deliver the number of
packages assigned to them for the day. For instance, the time it takes someone
to fasten and unfasten their seatbelt some 90-300 times a day is enough to put
them behind schedule on their route. Adrienne and many of her colleagues
buckled their seat belts behind their backs, so that the surveillance systems
registered that they were driving with a belt on, without getting slowed down
by actually driving with a belt on.

In 2020, Amazon drivers in the U.S. were injured at a nearly 50% higher rate
than their United Parcel Service counterparts. In 2021, Amazon drivers were
injured at a rate of 18.3 per 100 drivers, up nearly 40% from the previous year.
These conditions aren’t only dangerous for delivery drivers — pedestrians and
car passengers have been killed and injured in accidents involving Amazon
delivery drivers. Some drivers in Japan recently quit in protest because they
say Amazon’s software sent them on “impossible routes,” leading to
“unreasonable demands and long hours.” In spite of these clear harms,
however, Amazon continues to treat its workers like machines.

In addition to tracking its workers through scanners and cameras, last year,
the company required delivery drivers in the U.S. to sign a “biometric consent”
form, granting Amazon permission to use AI-powered cameras to monitor
drivers’ movements — supposedly to cut down on distracted driving or
speeding and ensure seatbelt usage. It’s only reasonable for workers to fear
that facial recognition and other biometric data could be used to perfect
worker-surveillance tools or further train AI — which could one day replace
them. The vague wording in the consent forms leaves the precise purpose open
for interpretation, and workers have suspected unwanted uses of their data
before (though Amazon denied it).

The “AI” industry runs on the backs of these low-wage workers, who are kept
in precarious positions, making it hard, in the absence of unionization, to push
back on unethical practices or demand better working conditions for fear of
losing jobs they can’t afford to lose. Companies make sure to hire people from
poor and underserved communities, such as refugees, incarcerated people and
others with few job options, often hiring them through third party firms as
contractors rather than as full time employees. While more employers should
hire from vulnerable groups like these, it is unacceptable to do it in a predatory
manner, with no protections.

“AI ethics researchers should analyze harmful AI systems as both

causes and consequences of unjust labor conditions in the industry.”

Data labeling jobs are often performed far from the Silicon Valley headquarters
of “AI first” multinational corporations — from Venezuela, where workers label
data for the image recognition systems in self-driving vehicles, to Bulgaria,
where Syrian refugees fuel facial recognition systems with selfies labeled
according to race, gender, and age categories. These tasks are often outsourced
to precarious workers in countries like India, Kenya, the Philippines or Mexico.
Workers often do not speak English but are provided instructions in English,
and face termination or banning from crowdwork platforms if they do not fully
understand the rules.

These corporations know that increased worker power would slow down their
march toward proliferating “AI” systems requiring vast amounts of data,
deployed without adequately studying and mitigating their harms. Talk of
sentient machines only distracts us from holding them accountable for the
exploitative labor practices that power the “AI” industry.

An Urgent Priority For AI Ethics

While researchers in ethical AI, AI for social good, or human-centered AI have
mostly focused on “debiasing” data and fostering transparency and model
fairness, here we argue that stopping the exploitation of labor in the AI
industry should be at the heart of such initiatives. If corporations are not
allowed to exploit labor from Kenya to the U.S., for example, they will not be
able to proliferate harmful technologies as quickly — their market calculations
would simply dissuade them from doing so.

Thus, we advocate for funding of research and public initiatives that aim to
uncover issues at the intersection of labor and AI systems. AI ethics
researchers should analyze harmful AI systems as both causes and
consequences of unjust labor conditions in the industry. Researchers and
practitioners in AI should reflect on their use of crowdworkers to advance their
own careers, while the crowdworkers remain in precarious conditions. Instead,
the AI ethics community should work on initiatives that shift power into the
hands of workers. Examples include co-creating research agendas with
workers based on their needs, supporting cross-geographical labor organizing
efforts and ensuring that research findings are easily accessed by workers
rather than confined to academic publications. The Turkopticon platform
created by Lilly Irani and M. Six Silberman, “an activist system that allows
workers to publicize and evaluate their relationships with employers,” is a
great example of this.

Journalists, artists, and scientists can help by drawing clear the connection
between labor exploitation and harmful AI products in our everyday lives,
fostering solidarity with and support for gig workers and other vulnerable
worker populations. Journalists and commentators can show the general
public why they should care about the data annotator in Syria or the
hypersurveilled Amazon delivery driver in the U.S. Shame does work in certain
circumstances and, for corporations, the public’s sentiment of “shame on you”
can sometimes equal a loss in revenue and help move the needle toward
accountability.

Supporting transnational worker organizing should be at the center of the fight

for “ethical AI.” While each workplace and geographical context has its own
idiosyncrasies, knowing how workers in other locations circumvented similar
issues can serve as inspiration for local organizing and unionizing efforts. For
example, data labelers in Argentina could learn from the recent unionizing
efforts of content moderators in Kenya, or Amazon Mechanical Turk workers
organizing in the U.S., and vice versa. Furthermore, unionized workers in one
geographic location can advocate for their more precarious counterparts in
another, as in the case of the Alphabet Workers Union, which includes both
high paid employees in Silicon Valley and outsourced low wage contractors in
more rural areas.

“This type of solidarity between highly-paid tech workers and their

lower-paid counterparts — who vastly outnumber them — is a tech
CEO’s nightmare.”

This type of solidarity between highly-paid tech workers and their lower-paid
counterparts — who vastly outnumber them — is a tech CEO’s nightmare.
While corporations often treat their low-income workers as disposable, they’re
more hesitant to lose their high-income employees who can quickly snap up
jobs with competitors. Thus, the high-paid employees are allowed a far longer
leash when organizing, unionizing, and voicing their disappointment with
company culture and policies. They can use this increased security to advocate
with their lower-paid counterparts working at warehouses, delivering packages
or labeling data. As a result, corporations seem to use every tool at their
disposal to isolate these groups from each other.

Emily Cunningham and Maren Costa created the type of cross-worker

solidarity that scares tech CEOs. Both women worked as user experience
designers at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters cumulatively for 21 years. Along
with other Amazon corporate workers, they co-founded the Amazon
Employees for Climate Justice (AECJ). In 2019, over 8,700 Amazon workers
publicly signed their names to an open letter addressed to Jeff Bezos and the
company’s board of directors demanding climate leadership and concrete steps
the company needed to implement to be aligned with climate science and
protect workers. Later that year, AECJ organized the first walkout of corporate
workers in Amazon’s history. The group says over 3,000 Amazon workers
walked out across the world in solidarity with a youth-led Global Climate
Strike.

Amazon responded by announcing its Climate Pledge, a commitment to

achieve net-zero carbon by 2040 — 10 years ahead of the Paris Climate
Agreement. Cunningham and Costa say they were both disciplined and
threatened with termination after the climate strike — but it wasn’t until AECJ
organized actions to foster solidarity with low-wage workers that they were
actually fired. Hours after another AECJ member sent out a calendar invite
inviting corporate workers to listen to a panel of warehouse workers discussing
the dire working conditions they were facing at the beginning of the pandemic,
Amazon fired Costa and Cunningham. The National Labor Relations Board
found their firings were illegal, and the company later settled with both women
for undisclosed amounts. This case illustrates where executives’ fears lie: the
unflinching solidarity of high-income employees who see low-income
employees as their comrades.

In this light, we urge researchers and journalists to also center low-income

workers’ contributions in running the engine of “AI” and to stop misleading
the public with narratives of fully autonomous machines with human-like
agency. These machines are built by armies of underpaid laborers around the
world. With a clear understanding of the labor exploitation behind the current
proliferation of harmful AI systems, the public can advocate for stronger labor
protections and real consequences for entities who break them.

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