Behind the AI boom, the armies of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’

Thousands of young workers log online everyday in the Philippines to support the ever-growing business of artificial intelligence, Rebecca Tan and Regine Cabato investigate

Internet cafes in the Philippines are now frequented by workers who sort and label data for artificial intelligence models (Photo for The Washington Post by Martin San Diego)

In dingy internet cafes, jam-packed office spaces or at home, they annotate the masses of data that American companies need to train their artificial intelligence models. The workers differentiate pedestrians from palm trees in videos used to develop the algorithms for automated driving; they label images so AI can generate representations of politicians and celebrities; they edit chunks of text to ensure language models like ChatGPT don’t churn out gibberish.

More than 2 million people in the Philippines perform this type of “crowdwork”, according to informal government estimates, as part of AI’s vast underbelly. While AI is often thought of as human-free machine learning, the technology actually relies on the labour-intensive efforts of a workforce spread across much of the global south and is often subject to exploitation.

The mathematical models underpinning AI tools get smarter by analysing large data sets, which need to be accurate, precise and legible to be useful. Low-quality data yields low-quality AI. So click by click, a largely unregulated army of humans is transforming the raw data into AI feedstock.