Artificial intelligence is just underpaid human labor

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The glossy story Silicon Valley tells about artificial intelligence usually involves brilliant engineers, trillion-dollar valuations, and a future so bright we can barely imagine it.

The reality repeatedly looks more like workers in Kenya spending eight hours a day labeling pornography, moderating graphic violence, or pretending to be AI sex bots for lonely strangers online. They are paid a few dollars a day.

The message of many data labelers and of the lawyers who have been helping them is that artificial intelligence is not a magical tool built by people in San Francisco making millions of dollars a year and pushing their companies to insane valuations. Artificial intelligence is an extractive technology that relies on the brutal labor of underpaid workers around the world. For years, the work of African data labelers has been more or less “ghost work,” the unseen, hidden labor that lets American tech companies build their products.

“AI can never be AI without humans. It is not artificial intelligence. It’s African intelligence,” Asia said. “Most of these are dirty jobs and most of these jobs have been done here in Africa. And then once you’re done, once a tool is functional, all the communication stops. You get locked out. We are training our own death. We train ChatGPT and it’s killing us slowly.”

Draconian nondisclosure agreements and terms of services that workers can’t opt out from have created a culture of fear, and one of DLA’s goals is to make it easier for workers to speak out. At the time I met Asia in January, the DLA had 870 members, but its ranks have been growing quickly.

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Turns out the “artificial” part of “artificial intelligence” mostly refers to marketing. The labor, whether data labelers in Kenya or Waymo drivers in the Philippines, is very real.