"Behind the AI boom, the armies of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’", 30 August 2023

In dingy internet cafes, jam-packed office spaces or at home, they annotate the masses of data that American companies need to train their artificial intelligence models. The workers differentiate pedestrians from palm trees in videos used to develop the algorithms for automated driving; they label images so AI can generate representations of politicians and celebrities; they edit chunks of text to ensure language models like ChatGPT don’t churn out gibberish.

More than 2 million people in the Philippines perform this type of “crowdwork”, according to informal government estimates, as part of AI’s vast underbelly. While AI is often thought of as human-free machine learning, the technology actually relies on the labour-intensive efforts of a workforce spread across much of the global south and is often subject to exploitation.

The mathematical models underpinning AI tools get smarter by analysing large data sets, which need to be accurate, precise and legible to be useful. Low-quality data yields low-quality AI. So click by click, a largely unregulated army of humans is transforming the raw data into AI feedstock.

In the Philippines, one of the world’s biggest destinations for outsourced digital work, former employees say that at least 10,000 of these workers do this labour on a platform called Remotasks, which is owned by the $7bn San Francisco start-up Scale AI.

Scale AI has paid workers at extremely low rates, routinely delayed or withheld payments and provided few channels for workers to seek recourse, according to interviews with workers, internal company messages and payment records, and financial statements. Rights groups and labour researchers say Scale AI is among a number of American AI companies that have not abided by basic labour standards for their workers abroad.

Of 36 current and former freelance workers interviewed, all but two said they’ve had payments from the platform delayed, reduced or cancelled after completing tasks. The workers, known as “taskers,” said they often earn far below the minimum wage – which in the Philippines ranges from $6 to $10 a day depending on region...

In a statement, Anna Franko, a Scale AI spokesperson, said the pay system on Remotasks “is continually improving” based on worker feedback and that “delays or interruptions to payments are exceedingly rare”.

But on an internal messaging platform for Remotasks...notices of late or missing payments from supervisors were commonplace. On some projects, there were multiple notices in a single month. Sometimes, supervisors told workers payments were withheld because work was inaccurate or late. Other times, supervisors gave no explanation. Attempts to track down lost payments often went nowhere, workers said – or worse, led to their accounts being deactivated...

In enlisting people in the Global South as freelance contractors, micro-tasking platforms like Remotasks sidestep labour regulations – such as a minimum wage and a fair contract - in favour of terms and conditions they set independently, said Cheryll Soriano, a professor at De La Salle University in Manila who studies digital labour in the Philippines...

Dominic Ligot, a Filipino AI ethicist, called these new workplaces “digital sweatshops”...

...government officials in the Philippines...admitted they weren’t sure how to regulate the platform. The Department of Information and Communications Technology...Data annotation is an “informal sector,” said department head Ivan John Uy. “Regulatory protective mechanisms are not there.”...

Initially, taskers said, they could earn as much as $200 in a week. Then in 2021, around the time Remotasks expanded to India and to Venezuela, pay rates plunged...Filipino freelancers went from earning $10 per task on some projects to less than 1 cent, according to a former SEPI staff employee...

By auctioning off work globally, Remotasks has created a “race to the bottom” for wages, said the owner of an outsourcing firm that has worked with SEPI. “It’s vicious competition,”...

In its terms and conditions, Remotasks says it “reserves the right” to withhold payment, remove freelancers from projects or deactivate their accounts for work deemed inaccurate. This “non-specified” set of rules, Valente said, lets the company decide if and when it wants to pay them for work even after it’s already been done...

For young people in places like Mindanao struggling to find work, there are few alternatives. Scale AI can exploit Filipino workers, said Philip Alchie Elemento, 37, an ex-tasker, “because they know we don’t have a choice”.