AI: Ghost workers demand to be seen and heard
Artificial intelligence and machine learning exist on the back of a lot of hard work from humans.
Alongside the scientists, there are thousands of low-paid workers whose job it is to classify and label data - the lifeblood of such systems.
But increasingly there are questions about whether these so-called ghost workers are being exploited.
As we train the machines to become more human, are we actually making the humans work more like machines?
And what role do these workers play in shaping the AI systems that are increasingly controlling every aspect of our lives?
The most well-established of these crowdsourcing platforms is Amazon Mechanical Turk, owned by the online retail giant and run by its Amazon Web Services division.
But there are others, such as Samasource, CrowdFlower and Microworkers. They all allow businesses to remotely hire workers from anywhere in the world to do tasks that computers currently can't do.
These tasks could be anything from labelling images to help computer vision algorithms improve, providing help for natural language processing, or even acting as content moderators for YouTube or Twitter.
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aiph Savage is the director of the Human Computer Interaction Lab at West Virginia University, and her research found that for a lot of workers, the rate of pay can be as low as $2 (£1.45) per hour - and often it is unclear how many hours someone will be required to work on a particular task.
"They are told the job is worth $5 but it might take two hours," she told the BBC.
"Employers have much more power than the workers and can suddenly decide to reject work, and workers have no mechanism to do anything about it."
And she says often little is known about who the workers on the platforms are, and what their biases might be.
She cited a recent study relating to YouTube that found that the algorithm had banned some LGBTQ content.
"Dig beneath the surface and it was not the algorithm that was biased but the workers behind the scenes, who were working in a country where there was censoring of LGBTQ content."
This idea of bias is born out by Alexandrine Royer, from the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, who wrote about what she described as the urgent need for more regulation for these workers.
"The decisions made by data workers in Africa and elsewhere, who are responsible for data labelling and content moderation decisions on global platforms, feed back into and shape the algorithms internet users around the world interact with every day," she said.
"Working in the shadows of the digital economy, these so-called ghost workers have immense responsibility as the arbiters of online content."
Google searches to tweets to product review rely on this "unseen labour", she added.
"It is high time we regulate and properly compensate these workers."
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56414491
