It is no secret that humanity has faced the phenomenon of low pay for a certain type of work, exactly at the moment when it invented trade and monetary relations. Time is changing, epochs are changing, but cheap labor continues to exist – only the scope of its use is changing. They started talking about “invisible labor” at the end of the last decade, when it became obvious that such a payment model had spread to the artificial intelligence industry. According to the forecasts of anthropologist Mary Gray and computational sociology specialist Siddharth Suri (authors of the book “Ghost Work: how to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass”) the maximum level of demand for such work in the digital sphere should be expected by 2030[1].
“For me, the dramatic shift is that we have never had industries that sell contract labor as completely as automation — not only to make it difficult for the consumer to see the supply chain, as we can in the textile, food and agricultural industries, but also to say that in fact there is no person working under a contract here at all. I get goosebumps at the very thought: if this is applied to every sector that effectively sells information services, it will lead to the loss of many people and their participation in the economy,[2]” Mary Gray said in an interview for MIT Technology Review back in 2019.
The term “ghost work” coined by the scientist implies manual labor of people aimed at improving the functioning of AI – this is content labeling, application programming, and many other actions. Sometimes the list of tasks can reach the point of absurdity: so, according to The Guardian[3], in place of the Google Assistant digital assistant, quite ordinary people sometimes turn out to be imitating the behavior of a virtual assistant. As one of the employees of the corporation said: “Artificial intelligence is not so artificial; it’s people who do the work.[4]”
It may seem that the artificial intelligence industry has become a crisis phase in the dynamics of white-collar employment in developed countries; however, this is not entirely true. As practice shows, a new “digital lower class” is being formed in countries that are in a state of protracted economic crisis – when educated young people with Internet access lose other ways of earning.
The scale of the “ghost work” was demonstrated by the crisis in Venezuela, which has become extremely painful for the South American republic. “It is really difficult to imagine a human tragedy of this magnitude outside of a civil war,[5]” Kenneth Rogoff, an economics professor at Harvard University and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, described what is happening in the country. The New York Times quotes his words in a 2019 article dedicated to Venezuela. Collapsed under the weight of sanctions, corruption and a number of other reasons, the economy of one of the richest countries in Latin America, left most of the population without means of livelihood. The El Petro stablecoin, introduced to reduce inflation, has not become a panacea for the state budget.
For Venezuelan youth, working on “improving AI” turned out to be a way out of a difficult situation. Despite the fact that the situation in the country has been slowly stabilizing in recent years (the average salary in Venezuela has risen by $ 0.72 over the year), “ghost labor” is still popular because of higher pay[6]. Under good conditions, those employed in the industry can receive up to $ 180 per month, without taking into account the commission charged by platforms for completing a set of tasks. For comparison, the salary of a judge in the republic is $ 130, and that of a university rector is $120[7].
“Over the past five years, crisis-ridden Venezuela has become the main source of this workforce. The country has plunged into the worst peacetime economic disaster the country has faced in almost 50 years, just at the moment when the demand for data labeling has increased dramatically. Crowds of well-educated people who were connected to the Internet began to join crowdworking platforms as a means of survival,[8]” MIT Technology Review provides a brief analysis of the reasons for the popularization of digital platforms for earning money.
The popularity of content labeling services increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a significant reduction in the cost of the tasks offered for completion. On the Appen platform, which divides tasks by access level (the higher it is the more expensive offers appear), there was even a “black market” for the sale of accounts for higher earnings[9]. All this testifies to one thing: because of its general availability, “ghost work” becomes extremely competitive. Moreover, this may mean that the percentage of cheap labor involved in improving artificial intelligence and not having access to “full-time work” will only grow.
The author of the article is Sofia Chernopyatova
[1] [2] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/05/31/103015/the-ai-gig-economy-is-coming-for-you/
[3] [4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/28/a-white-collar-sweatshop-google-assistant-contractors-allege-wage-theft
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/world/americas/venezuela-economy.html
[6] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/20/1050392/ai-industry-appen-scale-data-labels/
[7] https://bdeex.com/venezuela/
[8] [9] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/20/1050392/ai-industry-appen-scale-data-labels/
