TIMES.KY

Cayman Islands, Caribbeanand International News
Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

AI: Ghost workers demand to be seen and heard

AI: Ghost workers demand to be seen and heard

Artificial intelligence and machine learning exist on the back of a lot of hard work from humans.

Alongside the scientists, there are thousands of low-paid workers whose job it is to classify and label data - the lifeblood of such systems.

But increasingly there are questions about whether these so-called ghost workers are being exploited.

As we train the machines to become more human, are we actually making the humans work more like machines?

And what role do these workers play in shaping the AI systems that are increasingly controlling every aspect of our lives?

The most well-established of these crowdsourcing platforms is Amazon Mechanical Turk, owned by the online retail giant and run by its Amazon Web Services division.

But there are others, such as Samasource, CrowdFlower and Microworkers. They all allow businesses to remotely hire workers from anywhere in the world to do tasks that computers currently can't do.

These tasks could be anything from labelling images to help computer vision algorithms improve, providing help for natural language processing, or even acting as content moderators for YouTube or Twitter.

The 18th Century Mechanical Turk fooled chess players into thinking they were competing against a machine

MTurk, as it is known, is named after an 18th Century chess-playing automaton which toured Europe - but was later revealed to have a human behind it.

The platform is billed on its website as a crowdsourcing marketplace and "a great way to minimise the costs and time for each stage of machine-learning development".

It is a marketplace where requesters ask workers to perform a specific task.

"Most workers see MTurk as part-time work or a paid hobby, and they enjoy the flexibility to choose the tasks they want to work on and work as much or as little as they like," said a AWS spokesman.

But for Sherry Stanley, who has been working for the platform for six years, it is more like a full-time job, one that helped her financially bring up her three children, but one that has also made her feel like a very small cog in a very big machine.

"Turking is one of the few job opportunities I have in West Virginia, and like many other Turk workers, we pride ourselves on our work," she told the BBC.

"However, we are at the whim of Amazon. As one of the largest companies in the world, Amazon relies on workers like me staying silent about the conditions of our work."

She said she lived "in constant fear of retaliation for speaking out about the ways we're being treated".

It is hard to describe a typical day for Sherry because, as she puts it, "the hours vary day by day and the pay also varies".

The benefit of such work is that people can do as much or as little as they want, and work from home
But the tasks she is asked to complete are various, including image tagging and helping smart assistant Alexa understand regional dialects.

And there are also a series of issues she wants answers to, such as:

*  why some work is rejected and why workers, who may have spent a long time on it, are not told the reason that it was not up to standard

*  why some accounts are suddenly suspended without notice or official avenues for challenging the suspension

*  why requesters are setting the price of some projects at extremely low rates

"Turk workers deserve greater transparency around the who, what, why and where of our work: why our work is rejected, what our work is building, why accounts are suspended, where our data goes when it's not paid for, and who we are working for.

Turkopticon is the closest thing MTurk workers have to a union, and the advocacy group is working to make them feel less invisible.

"Turkopticon is the one tool that Turkers have evolved into an organisation to engage with each other about the conditions of our work and to make it better," said Ms Stanley

She is fundraising to help the organisation create a worker-operated server where contractors can to talk to each other about working conditions.

In response, Amazon told the BBC that it had introduced a feature in 2019 that allowed workers to see "requester activity level, their approval rate and average payment review time".

In a statement, it said: "While the overall rate at which workers' tasks are rejected by requesters is very low (less than 1%), workers also have access to a number of metrics that can help them determine if they want to work on a task, including the requester's historical record of accepting tasks.

"MTurk continues to help a wide range of workers earn money and contribute to the growth of their communities."

YouTube has had incidents where LGBTQ content is banned for no obvious reason - but is it the algorithm or the people behind it to blame?

Saiph Savage is the director of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at West Virginia University, and her research found that for a lot of workers, the rate of pay can be as low as $2 (£1.45) per hour - and often it is unclear how many hours someone will be required to work on a particular task.

"They are told the job is worth $5 but it might take two hours," she told the BBC.

"Employers have much more power than the workers and can suddenly decide to reject work, and workers have no mechanism to do anything about it."

And she says often little is known about who the workers on the platforms are, and what their biases might be.

She cited a recent study relating to YouTube that found that the algorithm had banned some LGBTQ content.

"Dig beneath the surface and it was not the algorithm that was biased but the workers behind the scenes, who were working in a country where there was censoring of LGBTQ content."

This idea of bias is born out by Alexandrine Royer, from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, who wrote about what she described as the urgent need for more regulation for these workers.

"The decisions made by data workers in Africa and elsewhere, who are responsible for data labelling and content moderation decisions on global platforms, feed back into and shape the algorithms internet users around the world interact with every day," she said.

"Working in the shadows of the digital economy, these so-called ghost workers have immense responsibility as the arbiters of online content."

Google searches to tweets to product review rely on this "unseen labour", she added.

"It is high time we regulate and properly compensate these workers."

Newsletter

Related Articles

TIMES.KY
0:00
0:00
Close
Paper straws found to contain long-lasting and potentially toxic chemicals - study
FTX's Bankman-Fried headed for jail after judge revokes bail
Blackrock gets half a trillion dollar deal to rebuild Ukraine
Israel: Unprecedented Civil Disobedience Looms as IDF Reservists Protest Judiciary Reform
America's First New Nuclear Reactor in Nearly Seven Years Begins Operations
Southeast Asia moves closer to economic unity with new regional payments system
Today Hunter Biden’s best friend and business associate, Devon Archer, testified that Joe Biden met in Georgetown with Russian Moscow Mayor's Wife Yelena Baturina who later paid Hunter Biden $3.5 million in so called “consulting fees”
Singapore Carries Out First Execution of a Woman in Two Decades Amid Capital Punishment Debate
Google testing journalism AI. We are doing it already 2 years, and without Google biased propoganda and manipulated censorship
Unlike illegal imigrants coming by boats - US Citizens Will Need Visa To Travel To Europe in 2024
Musk announces Twitter name and logo change to X.com
The politician and the journalist lost control and started fighting on live broadcast.
The future of sports
Unveiling the Black Hole: The Mysterious Fate of EU's Aid to Ukraine
Farewell to a Music Titan: Tony Bennett, Renowned Jazz and Pop Vocalist, Passes Away at 96
Alarming Behavior Among Florida's Sharks Raises Concerns Over Possible Cocaine Exposure
Transgender Exclusion in Miss Italy Stirs Controversy Amidst Changing Global Beauty Pageant Landscape
Joe Biden admitted, in his own words, that he delivered what he promised in exchange for the $10 million bribe he received from the Ukraine Oil Company.
TikTok Takes On Spotify And Apple, Launches Own Music Service
Global Trend: Using Anti-Fake News Laws as Censorship Tools - A Deep Dive into Tunisia's Scenario
Arresting Putin During South African Visit Would Equate to War Declaration, Asserts President Ramaphosa
Hacktivist Collective Anonymous Launches 'Project Disclosure' to Unearth Information on UFOs and ETIs
Typo sends millions of US military emails to Russian ally Mali
Server Arrested For Theft After Refusing To Pay A Table's $100 Restaurant Bill When They Dined & Dashed
The Changing Face of Europe: How Mass Migration is Reshaping the Political Landscape
China Urges EU to Clarify Strategic Partnership Amid Trade Tensions
Europe is boiling: Extreme Weather Conditions Prevail Across the Continent
The Last Pour: Anchor Brewing, America's Pioneer Craft Brewer, Closes After 127 Years
Democracy not: EU's Digital Commissioner Considers Shutting Down Social Media Platforms Amid Social Unrest
Sarah Silverman and Renowned Authors Lodge Copyright Infringement Case Against OpenAI and Meta
Italian Court's Controversial Ruling on Sexual Harassment Ignites Uproar
Why Do Tech Executives Support Kennedy Jr.?
The New York Times Announces Closure of its Sports Section in Favor of The Athletic
BBC Anchor Huw Edwards Hospitalized Amid Child Sex Abuse Allegations, Family Confirms
Florida Attorney General requests Meta CEO's testimony on company's platforms' alleged facilitation of illicit activities
The Distorted Mirror of actual approval ratings: Examining the True Threat to Democracy Beyond the Persona of Putin
40,000 child slaves in Congo are forced to work in cobalt mines so we can drive electric cars.
BBC Personalities Rebuke Accusations Amidst Scandal Involving Teen Exploitation
A Swift Disappointment: Why Is Taylor Swift Bypassing Canada on Her Global Tour?
Historic Moment: Edgars Rinkevics, EU's First Openly Gay Head of State, Takes Office as Latvia's President
Bye bye democracy, human rights, freedom: French Cops Can Now Secretly Activate Phone Cameras, Microphones And GPS To Spy On Citizens
The Poor Man With Money, Mark Zuckerberg, Unveils Twitter Replica with Heavy-Handed Censorship: A New Low in Innovation?
Unilever Plummets in a $2.5 Billion Free Fall, to begin with: A Reckoning for Misuse of Corporate Power Against National Interest
Beyond the Blame Game: The Need for Nuanced Perspectives on America's Complex Reality
Twitter Targets Meta: A Tangle of Trade Secrets and Copycat Culture
The Double-Edged Sword of AI: AI is linked to layoffs in industry that created it
US Sanctions on China's Chip Industry Backfire, Prompting Self-Inflicted Blowback
Meta Copy Twitter with New App, Threads
The New French Revolution
BlackRock Bitcoin ETF Application Refiled, Naming Coinbase as ‘Surveillance-Sharing’ Partner
×