Je zult de populaire chatbot ChatGPT niet snel betrappen op vieze woordjes of racistische taal. Hij is keurig getraind door tientallen Kenianen. Hun taak: het algoritme leren vooral niet te beginnen over moord, marteling en verkrachting, zodat wij – de gebruikers – geen smerige drek voorgeschoteld krijgen.
By Maurits Martijn for De Correspondent on January 28, 2023
OpenAI used outsourced workers in Kenya earning less than $2 per hour to scrub toxicity from ChatGPT.
By Billy Perrigo for Time on January 18, 2023
Some drivers in India are finding their accounts permanently blocked. Better transparency of the AI technology could help gig workers.
By Varsha Bansal for MIT Technology Review on December 6, 2022
This fantastic article by Williams, Miceli and Gebru, describes how the methodological shift of AI systems to deep-learning-based models has required enormous amounts of “data” for models to learn from. Large volumes of time-consuming work, such as labelling millions of images, can now be broken down into smaller tasks and outsourced to data labourers across the globe. These data labourers have terribly low wagen, often working in dire working conditions.
Continue reading “AI innovation for whom, and at whose expense?”
Supporting transnational worker organizing should be at the center of the fight for “ethical AI.”
By Adrienne Williams, Milagros Miceli and Timnit Gebru for Noema on October 13, 2022
Graduates from the Indian Institutes of Technology are highly sought after by employers. They can also bring problems from home.
By Saritha Rai for Bloomberg on March 11, 2021
Silicon Valley strikes again, with yet another techno-solutionist idea. Sanas, a speech technology startup founded by three former Stanford students, aims to alter the accents of call centre workers situated in countries such as India and the Philippines. The goal is to make them sound white and American. With a slide of a button, a call centre’s voice will be transformed into a slightly robotic, and unmistakeably white, American voice.
Continue reading “Whitewashing call centre workers’ accents”
A Silicon Valley startup offers voice-altering tech to call center workers around the world: ‘Yes, this is wrong … but a lot of things exist in the world’
By Wilfred Chan for The Guardian on August 24, 2022
Sanas’ service has already launched in seven call centers. But experts are concerned it could dehumanize workers.
By Joshua Bote for SFGATE on August 22, 2022
One of the classic examples of how AI systems can reinforce social injustice is Amazon’s A.I. hiring tool. In 2014, Amazon built an ´A.I. powered´ tool to assess resumes and recommend the top candidates that would go on to be interviewed. However, the tool turned out to be very biased, systematically preferring men over women.
Continue reading “Racist Technology in Action: How hiring tools can be sexist and racist”
In 2019, a Facebook content moderator in Nairobi, Daniel Motaung, who was paid USD 2.20 per hour, was fired. He was working for one of Meta’s largest outsourcing partners in Africa, Sama, which brands itself as an “ethical AI” outsourcing company, and is headquartered in California. Motaung led a unionisation attempt with more than 100 colleagues, fighting for better wages and working conditions.
Continue reading “Exploited and silenced: Meta’s Black whistleblower in Nairobi”
A Facebook lawyer called on a judge to “crack the whip” against a whistleblower who accuses the company of forced labor and human trafficking.
By Billy Perrigo for Time on July 1, 2022
The MIT Technology Review has written a four-part series on how the impact of AI is “repeating the patterns of colonial history.” The Review is careful not to directly compare the current situation with the colonialist capturing of land, extraction of resources, and exploitation of people. Yet, they clearly show that AI does further enrich the wealthy at the tremendous expense of the poor.
Continue reading “Don’t miss this 4-part journalism series on ‘AI Colonialism’”
In this piece, Julian Posada writes about a family of five in Venezuela, who synchronise their routines so that there will always be two people at the computer working for a crowdsourcing platform to make a living. They earn a few cents per task in a cryptocurrency and are only allowed to cash out once they’ve made at least the equivalent of USD 10. On average they earn about USD 20 per week, but their earnings can be erratic, resulting in extreme stress and precarity.
Continue reading “Exploitative labour is central to the infrastructure of AI”
Techno-capitalism is re-negotiating the social contract but knowledge about technologies is too often sequestered behind the lock doors of industry. Black women researchers like Dr. Timnit Gebru who raised alarm about the racial and ecological implications of emergent technologies are systematically silenced and forced out. Additionally, corporate capture of academic departments has even further limited the space to do critical research. Given these obstacles, how can researchers both inside and outside of tech companies do the difficult work of research, critique, and resistance? When individualist opportunism is the guiding norm of knowledge production, how do we cultivate a practice of transformative justice in the context of tech research? What are the set of tools and collective histories Black people in the Americas and the Black global diaspora can draw on in order to care for each other in the process of producing research about tech?
By Safiya Noble and Timnit Gebru for YouTube on March 31, 2022
The startup promises a fairly-distributed, cryptocurrency-based universal basic income. So far all it’s done is build a biometric database from the bodies of the poor.
By Adi Renaldi, Antoaneta Rouss, Eileen Guo and Lujain Alsedeg for MIT Technology Review on April 6, 2022
In their own words, former Tesla employees describe what they call a racist work environment that led California to file a civil rights lawsuit against the company.
By Margot Roosevelt and Russ Mitchell for Los Angeles Times on March 25, 2022
Refusing to see like a state.
By J. Khadijah Abdurahman and SA Smythe for Logic on December 25, 2022
We must curb the power of Silicon Valley and protect those who speak up about the harms of AI.
By Timnit Gebru for The Guardian on December 6, 2021
ADCU has launched legal action against Uber over the unfair dismissal of a driver and a courier after the company’s facial recognition system failed to identify them.
By James Farrar, Paul Jennings and Yaseen Aslam for The App Drivers and Couriers Union on October 6, 2021
Behind the promise of automation, advances of machine learning and AI, often paraded by tech companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Tesla, lies a deeply exploitative industry of cheap, human labour. In an excerpt published on Rest of the World from his forthcoming book, “Work Without the Worker: Labour in the Age of Platform Capitalism,” Phil Jones illustrates how the hidden labour of automation is outsourced to marginalised, racialised and disenfranchised populations within the Global North, as well as in the Global South.
Continue reading “Big Tech is propped up by a globally exploited workforce”Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.