Much ‘Artificial Intelligence’ Is Still People Behind a Screen
The nifty app CamFind has come a long way with its artificial intelligence. It uses image recognition to identify an object when you point your smartphone camera at it. But back in 2015 its algorithms were less advanced: The app mostly used contract workers in the Philippines to quickly type what they saw through a user’s phone camera, CamFind’s co-founder confirmed to me recently. You wouldn’t have guessed that from a press release it put out that year which touted industry-leading “deep learning technology,” but didn’t mention any human labelers.
Yet ignoring the workers who power these systems is leading to unfair labor practices and skewing the public’s understanding of how machine learning actually works.
There’s a reason this happens so often. Building AI systems requires many hours of humans training algorithms, and some companies have fallen into the gray area between training and operating. A common explanation is that human workers are providing “validation” or “oversight” to algorithms, like a quality-control check. But in some cases, these workers are doing more cognitively intensive tasks because the algorithms they oversee don’t work well enough on their own.
That can bolster unrealistic expectations about what AI can do. “It’s part of this quixotic dream of super-intelligence,” says Ian Hogarth, an angel investor, visiting professor at University College London and co-author of an annual State of AI report that was released on Tuesday. For the hidden workers, working conditions can also be “anti-human,” he says. That can lead to inequalities and poor AI performance.
For instance, Cathy O’Neil has noted that Facebook’s machine-learning algorithms don’t work well enough in stopping harmful content. (I agree.) The company could double its 15,000 content moderators, as suggested by a recent academic study. But Facebook could also bring its existing moderators out of the shadows. The contract workers are required to sign strict NDAs and aren’t allowed to talk about their work with friends and family, according to Cori Crider, the founder of tech advocacy group Foxglove Legal, which has helped several former moderators take legal action against Facebook over allegations of psychological damage. Facebook has said content reviewers could take breaks when they needed and were not pressured to make hasty decisions.
Moderation work is mentally and emotionally exhausting, and Crider says contractors are “optimized to within an inch of their lives” with an array of targets to hit. Keeping these workers hidden only exacerbates the problem.
A similar issue affects Amazon.com Inc.’s MTurk platform, which posts small tasks for freelancers. In their book “Ghost Workers,” Microsoft Corp. researchers Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri say these freelancers are part of an invisible workforce labelling, editing and sorting much of what we see on the internet. AI doesn’t work without these “humans in the loop,” they say, yet people are largely undervalued.
And a recent paper from academics at Princeton University and Cornell University called out data-labelling companies like Scale AI Inc. and Sama Inc. who pay workers in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa $8 a day. Sure, that’s a living wage in those regions but long-term it also perpetuates income inequality. A spokeswoman for Sama said the company has helped more than 55,000 people lift themselves out of poverty, and that higher local wages could negatively impact local markets, leading to higher costs for food and housing. Scale AI did not respond to a request for comment.
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