Underage Workers Are Training AI | WIRED UK
āŗhttps://www.wired.co.uk/article/artificial-intelligence-data-labeling-children
A friend put him on to the site, which promised work anytime, from anywhere. He found that an hourās labor would earn him around $1 to $2, he says, more than the national minimum wage, which was about $0.26 at the time. His mother is a homemaker, and his dad is a mechanical laborer. āYou can say I belong to a poor family,ā he says. When the pandemic hit, he needed work more than ever. Confined to his home, online and restless, he did some digging, and found that Toloka was just the tip of the iceberg.
āAI is presented as a magical box that can do everything,ā says Saiph Savage, director of Northeastern Universityās Civic AI Lab. āPeople just simply donāt know that there are human workers behind the scenes.ā
At least some of those human workers are children. Platforms require that workers be over 18, but Hassan simply entered a relativeās details and used a corresponding payment method to bypass the checksāand he wasnāt alone in doing so. WIRED spoke to three other workers in Pakistan and Kenya who said they had also joined platforms as minors, and found evidence that the practice is widespread.
āWhen I was still in secondary school, so many teens discussed online jobs and how they joined using their parentsā ID,ā says one worker who joined Appen at 16 in Kenya, who asked to remain anonymous. After school, he and his friends would log on to complete annotation tasks late into the night, often for eight hours or more.