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.
  • DarkCloud@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    Definitely true of data that needs to be tagged. Less true for text only data, which relies more on Markov chains.

    Interestingly the article doesn’t make this point, instead claiming workers in the global south are “feeding the data in” and doing maintenance work daily. So perhaps it’s on about moderation?

    • searabbit@piefed.socialEnglish
      6·
      2 days ago

      I only skimmed the article, but I’m familiar with this area of work. It’s the fine tuning phase of llms that require human “graders” in a sense to tell the model what is a helpful vs unhelpful response and elevate it from a literal autocomplete tool to a chatbot. The biggest platform for this kind of work is DataAnnotation if you want to look it up. It’s not just random people in the global south but also professionals training the model on their niche expertise (e.g., lawyers, accountants, engineers). The other type of work that has been going on even pre-llm chatbot era is, as you said, moderation. You moderate the chatbot for “bad” answers, correct them, and often that means impersonating the bot to the end user. I believe this is the main driver behind llm progress lately; literally humans teaching AI how to appear more human.

      • DarkCloud@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        That’s funny because what’s human can change from culture to culture. Still globalization has been changing that… Making a more universal culture via the Internet.

  • pikl@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Same as every other technology. So long as you don’t look down you won’t notice the bony slave backs you’re standing on.