IN DINGY internet cafes, jampacked office spaces or at home, thousands of young workers in the Philippines log on to annotate the masses of data that American companies need to train their artificial intelligence models, The Washington Post has reported.
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 2m 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.
Companies like US Scale AI pays workers at extremely low rates, routinely delays or withholds payments and provides few channels for workers to seek recourse, stated The Washington Post.
The above article was sent to subscribers in Pharmacy Daily's issue from 08 Sep 23
To see the full newsletter, see the embedded issue below or CLICK HERE to download Pharmacy Daily from 08 Sep 23
