AI Needs to Face Up to its Invisible-worker Problem

Saiph Savage, director of the human-computer interaction lab at West Virginia University, advocates for the workers who put in the time to develop training data for artificial intelligence. Many of the most successful and widely used machine-learning models are trained with the help of thousands of low-paid gig workers. Millions of people around the world earn money on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk, which allow companies and researchers to outsource small tasks to online crowdworkers. According to one estimate, more than a million people in the US alone earn money each month by doing work on these platforms. Around 250,000 of them earn at least three-quarters of their income this way.