this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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Despite being branded as autonomous and self-sustaining, artificial intelligence relies heavily on human labor — an army of data workers all over the world, primarily in the Global South. These workers “are purposely hidden by the companies that produce AI because they are the secret ingredient of AI itself,” says sociologist Antonio Casilli, the author of Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation and co-writer of the documentary In the Belly of AI. Casilli estimates that over 160 million people are involved in data work around the world.

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[–] dhork@lemmy.world 24 points 9 hours ago

I thought it was commonly understood that AI is short for Actually Indians

[–] TheFogan@programming.dev 15 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

So in other words, AI is just cheap exploited labor from impoverished people, with extra pollution steps.

[–] DevDave@piefed.social 4 points 4 hours ago

Amazon Turk 2.0

[–] Waterpumpee@lemmus.org 8 points 9 hours ago

A company named turing has a job posting open for 1 month duration. They want you to train their AI automating your job. Should have given that traitor a perm contract at least.

[–] RobotToaster@mander.xyz 6 points 8 hours ago

Exploited workers are the secret ingredient to everything under capitalism.

[–] oce@jlai.lu 5 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

There are the little hands, and there are also experts paid by AI companies to train AI to simulate themselves. This is how you get the good looking answers on complex coding questions for example. I received some emails asking me to teach my job to an AI...
Also it's not stopping to text, there are now also learning with videos of workers asked to perform manual tasks with the goal to replace them with manual robots in the future. So you can imagine the mind numbing job of reviewing thousands of question and answers, but replace it with doing thousands of boring manual tasks in front of cameras for a shitty pay.

[–] DandomRude@lemmy.world 3 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

It was never a secret: it’s still the Mechanical Turk, a historical model that, for example, the Amazon company of the same name is based on—and such services are part of its business.

[–] razen@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

Outliar, Data annotation, etc are all doing that. Ik people doing that.