It will come as no surprise to anyone that AI, along with its tremendous potential to (along with the occasional good thing) wreck the environment, break all and every social compact, destroy the economy, and out and out kill people (e.g., encouraging young people to kill themselves; identifying deadly mushrooms as edible (oops!); mistakenly targeting schools for bombing (collateral damage, anyone?) is also responsible for worker exploitation in Africa.
AI work is a major part of the Kenyan economy, where many Kenyans labor as content moderators and data labelers.
Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies. (Souroce: 404 Media)
A lot of this data labeling involves "annotating what [is] happening in every frame" of a porn video. Kenyan workers are also helping train up AI sexbots, providing the human element in raunchy and just-plain-sad talk sessions with all the lonely people who rely on the Internet for sex and companionship. The actual human workers are, of course, putting themselves out of business, given that the goal is to improve the verisimilitude of sexbots, obviating the need for any human involvement. More money for the AI tech bro masters of the universe! Yay!
It will come as no surprise that the work that the data labelers and other AI-adjacent workers are ill-paid and work under dreadful conditions. Given the content of their work, which involves "horrific content," many end up suffering from insomnia, PTSD, and sexual dysfunction in their actual human-to-human, skin-to-skin, honest-to-god real human lives.
But those Kenyan workers now have an organization behind them, the Data Labelers Association, which works:
...to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.
It will come as no surprise that the treatment of Kenyan workers is seen as an updated, teched-up version of the exploitation of African laborers by the imperialist companies that pillaged (and continue to pillage) the continent for its wealth of natural resources. Move over DeBeers and Exxon-Mobil. Today they've got company: "it's Apple, it's Meta, it's Gemini." It's Sam Altman. It's Elon Musk.
All part of the AI hype cycle:
...the promotional messaging and institutional ideology that casts artificial intelligence—particularly so-called “superintelligence”—as “inevitable” and destined to bring historic “transformation.”...
AI hype is the next chapter in the colonial playbook. It reframes the exploitation of African digital workers as “innovation” and is a tool of power wielded by profiteers of colonial extractivism in the digital age. It functions as a carefully crafted cover story by disguising appropriation in the language of “progress.” (Source: Tech Policy)
The Tech Policy article linked above is worth a full read. Sure it's lefty-ish, but it raises important issues around AI.
Declaring AI inevitable is how hype becomes colonial power. The rhetoric of inevitability, in particular, stages hype as a manifest destiny, stripping away the possibility of refusal or alternative futures.
All the hype about AI's transformative capabilities and its inevitability, with some occasional kneejerk BS thrown in on how AI is going to benefit everybody, is creating an environment where AI will be seen as inevitable and not worth resisting. We'll passively just sit here and let the tsunami wash over us and only then will we realize that it didn't exactly benefit everybody.
Will our coin-operated polity ever be able to hit the pause button, take a deep breath, and figure out how to get our hands around the AI beast?
I pinball around between 'God help us!,' 'Glad I'll be dead," and 'LFG.'
Today I'm feeling pretty Let's Fucking Go. Don't exactly know what this will entail, but it's got to be before it's too late.
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Image Source: Tech Policy
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