14-hour days with unregulated pay: As so-called click workers, people in low-wage countries train applications of artificial intelligence. Like Oskarina in Colombia, who couldn’t find a job as an engineer.
Oskarina Fuentes’ workday often lasts 14 hours or longer. She sits highly concentrated in her little room near Medellin in Colombia: twelve square meters, a bed with a pink blanket and manga characters on the cupboards. From here, the 33-year-old trains artificial intelligence applications as a so-called click worker. Oskarina doesn’t know who exactly she works for. She receives the tasks via a platform to which tech companies from all over the world have outsourced data collection.
Today is a good day because new tasks are constantly landing on Oskarina’s screen. “What can you do around Prague?” asks the system. At the same time, two windows open with two different answers. Oskarina has to choose the better answer, mark it and report it back to the system.
In other tasks, she decides which of two texts is more understandable. Or it teaches the application whether certain images are suitable for children or whether they have violent or sexual content. With every click Oskarina makes, the AI learns what is racist or offensive, for example. She is paid in US dollars and per task. “Some tasks are complex. Sometimes you have to do the same thing over and over again. For such simple tasks you only get a penny or two,” she explains.
Minimum wage for essential work
She earns almost $300 a month, just a little more than the Colombian minimum wage. She does not have an employment contract and has to pay for her own health insurance. And if there are no tasks for a day, she doesn’t earn anything. Oskarina’s reality – not just spatially – seems miles away from the dazzling world of Silicon Valley, where many ideas for AI applications arise: self-driving cars, chat bots and delivery drones.
Artificial intelligence would remain relatively useless without the millions of click workers worldwide who research, annotate and evaluate data to provide the AI with context. This is what the sociologist and computer scientist Milagros Miceli from the Berlin Weizenbaum Institute says. And that’s where the problem begins: multi-million dollar corporations outsource exactly these jobs to low-wage countries, to Kenya, India, Venezuela or Colombia.
“The companies do this intentionally and still target vulnerable population groups in low-wage countries. For example, there are job offers for single mothers or for people with disabilities,” says Miceli. On the one hand, there is a positive side to this because jobs are created where there otherwise wouldn’t be many opportunities. On the other hand, companies made a lot of money on the backs of underpaid workers. “Many are paid per task, not per hour,” criticizes Miceli: “Ultimately, they don’t know how much their time is worth and whether they will earn enough to survive.”
Own flat? “Priceless”
Oskarina feels the same way. She studied but couldn’t find a job as an engineer. Because of health problems, it helps her to work from home and she doesn’t have many other job opportunities in Colombia, where social inequality and poverty are omnipresent. But she has to share the apartment with her grandmother, mother and two uncles. “Living alone would be a dream, but it’s currently unaffordable,” says Oskarina.
It is unlikely that the situation will change. Worker protests are rare because it is difficult to organize the scattered workers. If one person refuses a task, someone else does it – somewhere in the world. Richard Mathenge calls this “digital colonialism.” Mathenge worked in Kenya for the Sama company, which recently came under fire. The New York Times brought to light that Sama employees worked for the chat bot ChatGPT and were primarily supposed to prevent it from crossing borders.
No adequate therapeutic care
Richard Mathenge reports that he and his colleagues were constantly confronted with disturbing texts and images. “Sodomy, rape, child abuse,” he lists. The psychological support that Sama had promised, however, was completely inadequate. “The companies we work for earn millions. They should invest some in the mental health of their employees,” says Mathenge, who has now co-founded a union for “content managers”.
The company contradicts this representation: On the one hand, Sama employees earned on average significantly more than the Kenyan minimum wage. On the other hand, they had access to group and individual therapy with professionally trained and licensed therapists, writes Sama.
Mathenge, on the other hand, sees this representation as an attempt by the company to save its image. He reports about unqualified therapists who hardly took any time. Many of his colleagues still suffer from the psychological stress to this day.
“Question of social responsibility”
Researcher Milagros Miceli sees tech companies as having a duty to improve the conditions for click workers. She demands higher pay, secure jobs and more recognition. “Companies should actually treat workers like experts and pay them because they do responsible work,” says Miceli. It’s not just about showing solidarity with the click workers.
“The conditions under which AI applications that we all use are trained should be of interest to all of us. This is a question of social responsibility,” emphasizes Miceli. Oskarina Fuentes would also like to have an employment contract and the right to an employment reference. She has mixed feelings about the job. On the one hand, she earns in US dollars and is currently staying afloat quite well. But of course, she says, for the corporations she and her colleagues are ultimately cheap workers.