An AI job boom? Here’s what the tedious, temporary work in data labelling is actually like

Amid all the talk about artificial intelligence (AI) both creating and destroying jobs, a troubling reality flies under the radar. The tasks machines can’t perform well are often offloaded onto marginalised global workers who are struggling in precarious labour markets. They do ostensibly “automated” work under exploitative conditions. Data work is an essential part of building and refining AI systems. Before AI models can “learn” anything, human data workers must categorise, label, test and moderate vast volumes of text, images, audio and video, to make the data usable for AI training. This labour is performed by an expanding global digital workforce that prepares the datasets not only for big tech, but also high-stakes industries such as banking, insurance, healthcare and government agen