Aleksej Severeks, a 34-year-old resident of Kansas City, has experienced a variety of occupations throughout his career. From assembling fast food sandwiches to working as a custodian and junk hauler, he has dabbled in various fields. He even dabbled in technical sound work for live theater. However, his current line of work is less hands-on but just as impactful: Savreux is an artificial intelligence (AI) trainer.
Savreux is part of a hidden army of contract workers who contribute to the development of AI systems behind the scenes. Their work involves training AI models to analyze data and create compelling text and images, which have wowed users of innovative products like ChatGPT. To increase the accuracy and effectiveness of AI, Savreux performs tasks such as labeling images and making predictions for text generation in applications. Despite the importance of their contributions, these contractors receive wages starting at $15 an hour with no benefits.
In recent years, Savreux and his fellow contractors have devoted countless hours to teaching OpenAI’s systems how to provide better responses in ChatGPT. Their feedback addresses an urgent and persistent need for OpenAI and its competitors: a constant flow of sentences, labels, and other training data. Savreux acknowledges the important role of contract workers, saying, “We’re grunt workers, but without it there wouldn’t be an AI language system. You can design all the neural networks you want, and you can get all these researchers involved.” You can do whatever you want, but without labelers, you have no ChatGPT. You have nothing.”
While Savreux’s job may not bring him fame or fortune, it is an essential but often overlooked area in the AI field. The field of AI can sometimes overshadow the labor of contract workers with the seeming magic of new technological frontiers. Sonam Jindal, program leader for AI, Labor, and the Economy at the Partnership on AI, a San Francisco-based nonprofit focused on AI research and education, highlights this oversight: “A lot about AI. All the talk is very congratulatory. But we’re missing a big part of the story: that it still relies heavily on a large human workforce.”
The tech industry has historically relied on the efforts of thousands of low-skilled and low-paid workers to build its computer empires. From punch card operators in the 1950s to recent Google contractors who expressed concerns about their second-class status, including yellow badges distinguishing them from full-time employees, the industry’s reliance on contract workers has It is not new. The rise of online gig work through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk further cemented this trend, especially during the early stages of the pandemic.
The growing AI industry is now following a similar pattern, embracing the volatile, on-demand nature of work. Individuals are employed through written contracts either directly by companies or through specialized third-party vendors that focus on temporary work or outsourcing. Health insurance and other benefits are rare or non-existent, reducing costs for tech companies. Moreover, the work is often anonymous, with credit mainly given to tech startup executives and researchers. In 2021, the Partnership on AI warned of an impending surge in demand for “data enrichment work” and recommended fair compensation and better practices. The organization also published voluntary guidelines for companies to adopt, though only DeepMind, Google’s AI subsidiary, has publicly committed to following them.
Jindal noted the importance of recognizing and respecting the contribution of contract workers, saying, “This is a new job that is being created by AI. We have the potential to be a high-quality job. And for the workers who are doing this work. Their contribution in enabling this progress should be respected and valued.”
Demand has grown, and some AI contract workers are asking for more. In Nairobi, Kenya, more than 150 people who have worked on AI for Facebook, TikTok and ChatGPT voted to form a union on Monday, citing low pay and job stress, Time magazine reported. gave Facebook and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the vote. OpenAI declined to comment.
