Hidden industry of low-paid workers fuels "AI"

Companies like the Australian data services company Appen are part of a vast, hidden industry of low-paid workers in some of the globe's cheapest labour markets who label images, video, and text to provide the datasets used to train the algorithms that power new bots. Appen, which has 1 million contributors, includes among its clients Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta. According to Grand View Research, the global data collection and labelling market was valued at $2.22 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow to $17.1 billion by 2030. Hot spots for this work are found in East Africa, Venezuela, India, the Philippines, and refugee camps in Kenya and Lebanon.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/low-paid-workers-are-training-ai-models-for-tech-giants     

Publication: Wired

Writer: Niamh Rowe