Examining the hidden labor economy behind AI

Concerns about artificial intelligence (AI) — its regulation, energy consumption, and production of misinformation — are under much active public debate. 

Yet one area of concern has received relatively little attention: the treatment of the workers who generate, annotate, and evaluate the massive amounts of data that drive AI. 

In his new book, “Platform Extractivism: Data Work and the People Powering Artificial Intelligence” (University of California Press), Julián Posada examines the conditions under which these workers were employed by major digital platform companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The major AI developers outsource the necessary data production to these companies, which, Posada found, routinely seek out workers in the world’s cheapest, and sometimes desperate, labor markets. Essentially, he argues, they extract value from these markets by exploiting economic instability.

The focus of much of his research is on Venezuela, which from 2018-2023 ranked in the top five countries for data production work. In a survey he distributed to platform workers there, they self-reported average wages of $1.73 per hour. 

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