Gig Workers Behind AI Face 'Unfair Working Conditions,' Oxford Report Finds

And with it, so are the digital labor platforms used by many AI companies to employ human gig workers. Those people perform the vital but often unseen labor of generating or labeling the masses of data that AI systems heavily rely on--often as part of efforts to make AIs more reliable and less biased. Even as these workers take on the vital task of making modern AI safer, the companies that employ them are uniformly failing to meet even a basic threshold of labor rights standards, according to a new report from the University of Oxford's Internet Institute, shared exclusively with TIME. Researchers assessed 15 digital work platforms--among them Amazon Mechanical Turk, Scale AI and Appen--and found that all of them were "still far from safeguarding basic standards of fair work," according to the report. "While the run for AI deployments gets public hype and momentum, workers behind the design, building and testing of these technological solutions, unfortunately, still face enormous challenges and experience unfair working conditions," the report says.