The Human Cost of AI

[jack action]

TL;DR Summary

AI is powered by hundreds of millions of exploited data workers in the Global South.

This week, I saw a documentary done by the French called Les sacrifiés de l'IA, which was presented by a Canadian show Enquête. If you understand French I recommend it. Very eye-opening.

I found a similar documentary in English called The Human Cost of AI: Data workers in the Global South.

There is also an interview with Milagros Miceli (appearing in both documentaries) on Youtube:

​

I also found a powerpoint presentation by the economist Uma Rani (appearing in the French documentary), AI supply chains: The hidden human labour powering AI, which kind of resume her research about the subject. From that presentation:

Myth: Data needs are not finite, but infinite to sustain AI systems

Her point of view is that AI systems will never become sufficient and will always rely on data workers to feed them more data because things are always evolving, thus new data aways need to be examined. I thought it was a very interesting point.

 

[jedishrfu]

There was a documentary of Philipine workers who did content moderation for Facebook and other major sites.

They suffered terribly with PTSD from all the horrible videos, posts and photos they had to review. They had no means of getting psychological help on how to deal with it.

 

[jack action]

But there is more than looking at horrible images.

In The Human Cost of AI: Data workers in the Global South, we can see how people in Africa looks at images of San Francisco traffic to train AI to recognize the San Francisco environment. The point of Uma Rani is that the San Francisco environment will change over time, thus the AI training will never stop, and either that cheap labor will always be needed or AI will cost a lot more in the future.

The "free" work done by AI for us (recognizing our environment) is actually just done overseas by cheap labor. AI does not do the job for us, it just permits people overseas to do it for us. That is food for thoughts.

AI for very specialized field seems to be a good idea - like discovering new molecules, for example - but to replace our daily repetitive tasks, it might not be as effective as we are told.

 

[jedishrfu]

Yeah there also was a business of people cracking captchas for pennies allowing scammers access to captcha protected sites.

 

[Rive]

AI is powered by hundreds of millions of exploited data workers in the Global South.

That's some really wild over-exaggeration on the altar of sensationalism.
Yes, the IT- and data industry both has strong reliability on cheap and exploitable workforce.
But you won't find those numbers in the whole (!) industry.

Especially these days with the impact AI has on IT jobs.

I'm more concerned about the shrinking number of jobs and the general long term social and mental effects of the everyday reliance.

 

[jedishrfu]

There are a few good examples of people stressing out:

- A person loses their phone or breaks it, causing the loss of contacts, photos, notes, and more.

- Someone bricks another person's phone, and they have no way to recover their data.

(happened to a friend when another person got the friend's phone and thought it was their
phone // after retyping the password too many times, bricked the phone -- and then ooh this isn't
my phone -- Duh)

- GPS maps stop working, causing people to get lost because they no longer carry paper maps

(happened to me at Grand Canyon when cell phone service had zero bars and I needed
to reload a map - fortunately, I had a similar one on my iPad)

- Lost phone, so now you have to use written directions to get where you're going.
Now there are no queuing notifications that the turn is coming up. Exit now.

(reminiscent of the tech show host, James Kim, while driving through Portland, and then decided
to switch to another highway on their way to Gold Beach, Oregon, took an old logging road that
was closed during the winter, but a hunter had left the road gate open.)

- doing a simple mental calculation done previously on your phone's calculator app

In each of these scenarios, people stress out due to their reliance on modern communication technology and services.

 

[jack action]

That's some really wild over-exaggeration on the altar of sensationalism.
Yes, the IT- and data industry both has strong reliability on cheap and exploitable workforce.
But you won't find those numbers in the whole (!) industry.

According to a report from the World Bank, the estimated number of data workers worldwide is between 150 and 430 million. It is discussed in the Miceli interview between 5:56 and 10:15.

 

[Rive]

worldwide

That's something very different.
Could you please provide a proper reference to that report and its content?