AI and the exploitation of Kenyan workers

From 404 Media, yet another reason to despise AI corporations.

Every day, Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight consecutive hours at his laptop in Kenya staring at porn, annotating what was happening in every frame for an AI data labeling company. When he was done with his shift, he started his second job as the human labor behind AI sex bots, sexting with real lonely people he suspected were in the United States. His boss was an algorithm that told him to flit in and out of different personas.

“It required a lot of creativity and fast thinking. Because if I’m talking to a man, I’m supposed to act like a woman. If I’m talking to a woman, I need to act like a man. If I’m talking to a gay person, I need to act like a gay person,” he told me at a [coworking] space I met him at in Nairobi. After doing this for months, he, like other data labelers, developed insomnia, PTSD, and had trouble having sex.

He eventually quit those jobs and joined a growing labor group.

Asia eventually hit a breaking point and stopped working for AI companies. He is now the secretary general of a Kenyan organization called the Data Labelers Association (DLA) and the author of “The Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,” a testimony of his time working as the real human labor behind AI sex bots. As part of the DLA, Asia has been working to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.

During a DLA event, one of the speakers connected the dots between exploitation by British colonizers and the current exploitation by multinational corporations, many of which are based in the U.S.

“You can’t understand where you’re positioned if you don’t understand your history,” Angela, one of the day’s speakers, told the workers who had assembled there (many of the speakers at the event did not give their full names). “When you think of colonialism, we were under British Imperial East Africa Company […] so literally, we are working under a company. We are just products, part of their operation. Stakeholders, we can say, but we are at the bottom of the bottom.”

“These multinationals are coming to rule and dominate here,” she added. “It’s a very unfortunate supply chain, and my call today as data labelers is to build up on this—as we are fighting for labor rights, we are also fighting for the environment […] we are fighting big companies. We are fighting the British imperialist companies of today. It’s Apple, it’s Meta, it’s Gemini. Those are the ones we’re still fighting. It’s a call for solidarity and expanding our thinking beyond what we are doing, beyond our labor.”

You can read more about the DLA at the org’s website.

Another part of the article mentions that another common data labeling job in Kenya involves reviewing raw footage from Meta glasses, which is often extremely graphic and of course there was little or not mental health care for the people who were making protecting users from horrific images and companies like Meta from lawsuits. That work is through a San Francisco-based contractor called Sama. Or it was. Meta ended its contract with Sama, which in turn laid off more than 1,000 employees in Kenya.

Meta and its local contractor Sama have been in court since 2022 after former content moderators accused them of paying low wages and not offering sufficient mental health support. Sama has since changed its business model and stopped offering content moderation services to Meta, but has remained focused on services such as AI data labeling for the tech giant.

Workers from several African nations are suing Meta and Sama for more than $1.6 billion.

Sama said in a statement Thursday that it received formal notice from Meta to end a “major engagement at its Nairobi office.” Sama said it has issued a formal layoff notice that would affect 1,108 staffers, adding that it was “actively supporting affected employees with care and respect.”

No one smart enough to enter a question in ChatGPT believes that. Companies that treat workers like cheap machinery aren’t going to be any nicer after they’re fired. I assume we’ll soon hear about attempts to get people to drop the lawsuit in exchange for their last paycheck. But that’s the sort of pablum meant to give moral cover to the company and the end user who doesn’t plan to change their behavior in the first place.