Contractors training Amazon, Meta and Microsoft’s AI systems left without pay after Appen moves to new platform

One-third of payments to contractors training AI systems used by companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have not been paid on time after the Australian company Appen moved to a new worker management platform.

Appen employs 1 million contractors who speak more than 500 languages and are based in 200 countries. They work to label photographs, text, audio and other data to improve AI systems used by the large tech companies and have been referred to as “ghost workers” – the unseen human labour involved in training systems people use every day.
↫ Josh Taylor at The Guardian

It’s crazy that if you peel back the layers on top of a lot of tools and features sold to us as “artificial intelligence”, you’ll quite often find underpaid workers doing the labour technology companies are telling us are done by computers running machine learning algorithms. The fact that so many of them are either deeply underpaid or, as in this case, not even paid at all, while companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI are raking in ungodly amounts of profits, is deeply disturbing. It’s deeply immoral on so many levels, and just adds to the uncomfortable feeling people have with “AI”.

Again I’d like to reiterate I’m not intrinsically opposed to the current crop of artificial intelligence tools – I just want these mega corporations to respect the rights of artists, and not use their works without permission to earn immense amounts of money. On top of that, I don’t think it should be legal for them to lie about how their tools really work under the hood, and the workers who really do the work claimed to be done by “AI” to be properly paid. Is any of that really too much to ask?

Fix these issues, and I’ll stop putting quotation marks around “AI”.