Alexej Savreux, a
34-year-old resident of Kansas City, has had a rich variety of job experiences across different disciplines, from assembling fast-food sandwiches to being a custodian and a junk haulier as well as indulged in technical sound work for live theatre. He currently finds himself in a unique role enabling Artificial Intelligence (AI) – an AI trainer. He is a part of a vast community of contract workers who are making an extensive contribution in developing AI systems. Their gig requires training AI models to understand data, analyze trends, and generate text and realistic images. ChatGPT, one of the cutting-edge products banking on AI, has been able to make astounding feats mostly because of their invaluable feedback.
Their efforts, however, are often undervalued, given they are paid as low as $15 per hour and are deprived of any benefits. OpenAI, one of the AI organisations, has leveraged the aid of such contract workers to continuously update the accuracy of their chatbot programs like ChatGPT. Savreux accepted his role in his job and is delegated to labeling images and making predictions for textual generation in applications. He has realized that AI could not exist without them, saying “We are grunt workers, but there would be no AI language systems without it. You can design all the neural networks you want, and you can get all the researchers involved you want, but without labellers, you have no ChatGPT. You have nothing”.
Notwithstanding the lack of acknowledgment from the AI industry, its necessity does not shift the importance of Savreux and the many other contract workers’ task at hand. The hype created by the advances in AI sometimes loosens its grip on how such development requires labor – often in the form of menial, unglamorous work. Sonam Jindal, the program lead for AI, Labour, and the Economy at the Partnership on AI, called attention to the contrast between glamour and the grunt workers behind the scenes. The industry is not immune to often taking advantage of individuals, as seen in the case of Google’s tactics of issuing yellow badges to its contractors or abusing the gig economy platform (Amazon Mechanical Turk).
The Partnership on AI alerted of an ensuing surge in need of AI trainers, further stressing the importance of extending livable wages and fair working conditions to employees, while also highlighting the need for recognition and respect. DeepMind is the only publically listed AI company that has committed to abiding by the Partnership’s voluntary guidelines. Furthermore, the people in Nairobi, Kenya working in AI for Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT, recently took a historic step by voting to form a union in hopes for a better wage and stance in the company.
OpenAI, the AI-based research lab, declined any comment on this issue. Facebook and TikTok, however, have yet to reply to requests for insights. It is without a doubt, quite important that companies recognize the efforts of this workforce at the very least, and extend job security, wages, and benefits that reflect the nature of their work. Such an act could signify an important milestone in the continual support of contract workers for the AI industry.
