The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence

Adrienne Williams and Milagros Miceli are researchers at the Distributed AI Research (DAIR) Institute. Timnit Gebru is the institute's founder and executive director. She was previously co-lead of the Ethical AI research team at Google. The public's understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) is largely shaped by pop culture -- by blockbuster movies like "The Terminator" and their doomsday scenarios of machines going rogue and destroying humanity. This kind of AI narrative is also what grabs the attention of news outlets: a Google engineer claiming that its chatbot was sentient was among the most discussed AI-related news in recent months, even reaching Stephen Colbert's millions of viewers.