Microworkers

Over the years, Urban Company, which in 2014 offered women economic independence in India, a country that has very low female participation in the workforce, has increasingly removed flexibility and autonomy for its workers while raising the cost of getting started as a worker on the app to the

A former TikTok moderator in Kenya has threatened a lawsuit against TikTok's owner, ByteDance, alleging that he has developed PTSD as a result of his work for the company and that he was unfairly dismissed for advocating for better working conditions. In a letter, his lawyer alleges that the job

Companies like the Australian data services company Appen are part of a vast, hidden industry of low-paid workers in some of the globe's cheapest labour markets who label images, video, and text to provide the datasets used to train the algorithms that power new bots. Appen, which has 1 million

Human raters have played a significant role in the rapid improvement in the machine learning models that fuel modern AI. The raters evaluate the algorithmic output of search engines and AI chatbots and provide "Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback" (RLHF) – the technical name for the

Behind every powerful AI system are huge numbers of people labelling and clarifying data to train it, contracted by companies like Remotasks, a subsidiary of Silicon Valley-based data vendor Scale AI, whose customers include the US military and OpenAI. Often the workers, who are assigned tasks they

More than 150 workers employed by third-party outsourcing companies to provide content moderation for AI tools on Facebook, TikTok, and ChatGPT depend have pledged to create the African Content Moderators Union. The move to create such a union began in 2019 when the outsourcing company Sama fired

Outsourced artists, designers, copywriters, software developers, and call centre operators in the global south are the first to feel the effects of the arrival of generative AI, as client companies see the new technology as a way of cutting costs. Some workers are adding prompt engineering to their

Technology companies that call themselves "AI first" rely on heavily surveilled gig workers who label data, deliver packages, moderate content, and perform gig work via platforms. Startups pressured by their venture capital funders even hire humans to pretend to be chatbots so they can claim to be

Four people in Kenya have filed a petition calling on the government to investigate conditions for contractors reviewing the content used to train large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. They allege that these are exploitative and have left some former contractors traumatized. The petition