The Partnership on AI warned in a 2021 report that a spike in demand was coming for what it called “data enrichment work.” It recommended that the industry commit to fair compensation and other improved practices, and last year it published voluntary guidelines for companies to follow. Benefits such as health insurance are rare or nonexistent - which translates to lower costs for tech companies - and the work is usually anonymous, with all the credit going to tech startup executives and researchers. The work is defined by its unsteady, on-demand nature, with people employed by written contracts either directly by a company or through a third-party vendor that specializes in temp work or outsourcing. Now, the burgeoning AI industry is following a similar playbook.

Online gig work through sites like Amazon Mechanical Turk grew even more popular early in the pandemic. The tech industry has for decades relied on the labor of thousands of lower-skilled, lower-paid workers to build its computer empires: from punch-card operators in the 1950s to more recent Google contractors who’ve complained about second-class status, including yellow badges that set them apart from full-time employees. “We are grunt workers, but there would be no AI language systems without it,” said Savreux, who’s done work for tech startups including OpenAI, the San Francisco company that released ChatGPT in November and set off a wave of hype around generative AI. Their feedback fills an urgent and endless need for the company and its AI competitors: providing streams of sentences, labels and other information that serve as training data. Out of the limelight, Savreux and other contractors have spent countless hours in the past few years teaching OpenAI’s systems to give better responses in ChatGPT. The pay: $15 an hour and up, with no benefits. To improve the accuracy of AI, he has labeled photos and made predictions about what text the apps should generate next. Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who have been doing the behind-the-scenes labor of teaching AI systems how to analyze data so they can generate the kinds of text and images that have wowed the people using newly popular products like ChatGPT.

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