The "Modern Day Slaves" Of The AI Tech World

[Music] wake up it's [Music] 2027 in 2027 Sarah takes care of everything [Music] Sarah is a virtual assistant who knows exactly what's best for you [Music] everywhere you go artificial intelligence like Sarah predicts your needs and does the work for [Music] you with all of these Machines working for you isn't life wonderful in [Music] 2027 but let's not get carried away before Sarah changes your life forever there's another story to tell one with less special effects this story takes place behind the scenes of those businesses who are working to invent our future for now it's

hardly this wonderful world where machines are working entirely for mankind in fact you could say it's exactly the opposite humans are involved in every step of the process when you're using anything online but we're sold as this miracle of automation Google Facebook Amazon Uber these digital Giants are using a completely invisible Workforce to keep their applications running there we are with technology you can actually find them pay them the tiny amount of money um and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore a Workforce that is disposable and underpaid on a very

good day I could do $5 an hour on a really bad day I could do 10 cents an hour I mean it it's is it possible for you to pay less than the American minimum wage I'm not sure we want to go in this direction yeah whilst millions of men and women are training artificial intelligence for next to nothing others are being hired and hidden out of sight to clean up social networks you must have been told by the recruiting team that you cannot mention that you are working for this project okay we went undercover

as one of these web cleaners working as a Content moderator for Facebook there's a few things that I saw those things are going to stay with me because I I remember them was if it was yesterday to meet the workers hiding behind your screen we're taking you to the factory of the future the digital economy's best kept secret you know it's just like a Sausage Factory they don't want people to come in to see how the sausage is made I mean I think it's just that simple to delve into the mysteries of artificial intelligence we're

heading to the west coast of the US here in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley the World of Tomorrow is being developed it's the high-tech Hub of giants like apple Facebook YouTube Uber Netflix and [Music] Google we have a meeting of figure8 a business specializing in artificial intelligence that primarily works with Google the founder Lucas bald agreed to spend the morning with us Lucas hello hello Lucas nice to meet you thank you very much for your time of course I know you have a busy schedule thank you at 38 years old this Stanford Graduate has

already worked for the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo before founding his own company once his microphone is on a quick tour of their startup style Californian office space this is our our best dressed employee cool and relaxed this is probably our our worst dress in [Laughter] play do you play babyfoot I think I'm pretty good I don't know maybe this is kind of our eating area is actually where I like to work my coffee got [Laughter] cold and in the reception area an impressive display so these are some of our some of our customers and

the the different things that they did with our our products here's Twitter we help them remove a lot of um people that were kind of bullying um on their website you know American Express is that in France I don't yeah you know I feel especially proud of you know something like Tesco right is able to to use us to improve their um online website to show better search results so people can find um the items that they're looking for and I don't see Google oh no I don't know what do you know how like why

some of these get up here uh we frankly we we just stop it was it was getting out of hand this is Mr Brown head of PR but this is just a good sample after our visit the founder explains the enigmatic name figure8 we call her company figure8 because we think of it as a loop and the loop really has um these these two parts right there's the humans that do the labeling um and then the machine learning that learns from the humans and then it goes back to the humans um for more labeling right

so um we we think of um this kind of like beautiful Loop right where humans do the best things that humans can do and the algorithms the artificial intelligence does the best things that the algorithms can do and we we put that together and that's why we call it figure [Music] eight to get a better understanding of why AI needs humans to function we stop joking around and get out the computer so here's an example you know a lot of people these days are trying to build cars that automatically drive like for example Tesla um

has a a system where you can drive around in a car but of course it's incredibly important that these cars don't run into pedestrians so the car camera just sees something like this so it's really important that they build reliable systems that can identify people and the way that they learn to identify people is looking at lots of pictures of what the car is seeing from the camera and then actually literally labeling where the people are so in this here's a real example of how it works if you want to teach a self-driving car to

recognize a pedestrian a human like you or I it first has to identify pedestrians from photos and then feed this information to the AI and this process has to be done over a thousand even a million ion times over which can be very timec consuming this is where figure8 gets involved using real people who are paid to do this work so the task here is to look at this picture and then label where the people are and so you get paid for this you get paid to draw boxes around the people how much um you

know I'm not sure this task um but you know maybe it would be like um you know maybe 10 cents per person that you draw a box around who do this job do you have employees doing these jobs and labeling people yeah so it's contractors on our in our Network that that log in and do these jobs what do you mean by contractors on on your network what kind of people so it's like people that that log into this and then um and then want to to work on these tasks how many people uh work

for figure eight in this capacity as as labelers yeah um so again it's people can kind of come and go if they want to so there's maybe around a 100,00 people that kind of consistently work um every day for you know for certain use cases that we have um but then there's also millions of people that log in from time to time and work on tasks and where do those people live they live all over the world actually so they live all over America and then they live all over um the the world um so

who are these millions of people who are being paid to train AI technology in order to meet these contractors as figure a calls them we leave Silicon Valley and head 500 miles north of San Francisco in Oregon [Music] there we are aha success Jared Mansfield signed up to Figure 8 3 years ago he now spends several hours a week working for them every day the company offers a list of tasks that he can complete for money for example training search [Music] engines for this first one it's showing examples of how to do it the query

is mac and cheese parois and the two results are Annie's homegrown organic mac and cheese and Annie's really Shedd or microwavable macaroni and cheese which are neither of them are progis so it's saying that one would be equally bad matches what's the use of doing that a lot of it I think uh is to train search search algorithms so like when someone sits at their computer and types a product the algorithm will be able to determine with more accuracy what product it is that that person's looking for for every 10 answers Jared earns less than

one cent to get an idea of how much money he can make we leave him to work for 30 minutes he's answered 180 questions over the course of half an hour how much you earned 15 cents for how long a half hour which would be 30 cents the hour yeah which are pretty definitely not live a livable wage that's for sure do they have their right to do this I mean they have the right to do whatever they want I'm the one coming to them for little tiny bits of of coins on this website and

uh it's no we there's no contract between me and them no contract no salary no guaranteed minimum wage these ghost workers are paid to train software and robots using only one rule supply and demand it definitely feels like like I'm part of this invisible Workforce that is kind of made up of just random people throughout the world and uh together we're kind of uh training what's going to replace the workforce as a whole eventually Jared is very philosophical about the idea still he can afford to be to earn a real living he has another job

selling chicken in the supermarket for a little more than $1,500 a month figure eight is just what he does on the side to earn a little extra cash [Music] after leaving Oregon we decided to take advantage of what we'd learned in America and sign ourselves up to Figure 8 to train Artificial Intelligence on the site's welcome page small tasks are proposed at 1 two or 12 cents we chose this as our first task drawing boxes around objects in images following the instructions it took us several minutes to draw around 10 objects and earn 2 cents

on the list of tasks Figure 8 also offers evaluations of search engine answers Jared's task of choice we could also listen to conversations and confirm if the recording features a man or a woman's voice and if they are speaking English hi is James there please we work for hours without ever earning more than 30 cents an hour it's difficult to imagine that there are people who work on these tasks on a full-time basis we're in Maine on the east coast of the United States close to the Canadian border we've arranged to meet with one of

the Nets ghost workers The Human Side of the figure8 loop her name is Don Carbone she is 46 years old hello hello h Hello Hello nice to meet you thank you so much for your welcome it's beautiful yes seen oh we had a blizzard not that long ago and then we got more stuff and it's also I think negative s out there Don is a single mother she lives here with three of her children this is what subsidized housing looks like up here I mean it's not bad for public hous she lives and works here

working on the figure8 site all day I'll turn it on like I said right before 7 o'clock you know get the initial stuff done um I'll turn it I'll turn this off at 3:00 in the afternoon and then turn it back on at 9:00 at night so I'll say eight hours minimum so I bust my butt though like this would be the dashboard you could see I've done 6,445 tasks since when 3 years see these different badges you start off you have no badge and you have to do so many questions and get so many

right and then you get your first level badge and then then when you get to level three you have access to virtually all the tasks that are put up um what is your Le level right now right now oh I'm on level three I've been level three I've been level three for quite a while Don is considered a high performing worker figure8 therefore offers her more work than a beginner but it isn't necessarily more interesting I have to put bounding boxes around people I'm not really keen on this job the biggest problem is trying to

find jobs that are viable and right now I don't have many and it's definitely not better paid on a very good day I could do $5 an hour on a really bad day I could do 10 cents an hour I mean it's I mean I have had some really really good days until February yeah do you think uh this is a fair payment for what you're doing no no no not at all but I live in northern Maine we get a lot of snow it's there's a very low job market and it helps be as

a stay-at-home mom um it it helps with added income yeah Don prefers to work from home because her youngest daughter Jane has autism here you go what happened Don wants to be there to take care of her when she gets home from school at 3 p.m. so how was school good day or bad day good really a good day with her autism I always have to be ready to jump in my car and go get her from school I mean it could happen one day out of the week or not at all or three days

out of the week um and the school is very understanding so I mean I have to take out the whole week if I was working out of the home Don receives $750 in government Aid every month which isn't enough to cover all of her bills this is why she signed up to Figure 8 by working eight hours a day and 5 days a week she says she earns on average $250 a month on the site on figure eight the pay is non-negotiable if you refuse the work there will always be someone else to take it

there is an unlimited supply of these ghost workers coming from all over the world it's probably why Lucas bwal is so happy but he isn't the only one to take advantage of this phenomenon various other businesses propose these sorts of repetitive and underpaid online tasks the biggest amongst them being click worker an Amazon Mechanical Turk a platform provided by Amazon and its boss Jeff Bezos who invented the concept in 20 05 think of it as microwork microwork is a growing concern for the ILO the international labor organization a UN agency in charge of protecting workers

rights across the [Music] globe hello Jenine thanks for your time Janine Berg is the resident expert on this subject at the ILO who speaks to us through Skype with globalization you can see the emergence of kind of a global labor force here uh it's the next step it's really the the service industry that can break up work into kind of very short little succinct tasks uh and then you know dulge it to to workers all over the world who compete for the jobs do the jobs the the price of the wages are are driven down

because of this Global labor Supply and the technology has has facilitated this and it's cheap that's that's the other the main advantage Janine Berg wrote a report calculating that micro workers earn on average $3.31 an hour without any rights in return workers extreme vulnerability is the key to Lucas B Walt's business model after months of Investigations we found this video from 2010 that sums up his view of the labor force before the internet it would be really difficult to find someone sit them down for 10 minutes and get them to work for you and then

fire them after those 10 minutes but with technology you can actually find them pay them the tiny amount of money um and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore while we were interviewing him we wanted to ask him if he still shared the same opinion but when we start talking talking about work conditions the figure8 founder seemed to lose his sense of humor do you have an idea of the average revenue per hour of your contributor you know I'm not sure it's totally dependent on the task that someone puts in and

it's hard to track time on the internet because people can walk away from their computer and come back so I don't know how much people um generally make there was a report on ILO saying that on average the people working on crowdsourcing were paid 33 $31 an hour would that be consistent with what you pay again I'm not sure is it possible for you to pay less than the American minimum wage it's it could be possible so this is legal um I'm not sure we want to go in this direction yeah you know what can

we take us a different direction I mean I'd rather just focus on more AI than than anything yeah but this is the whole thing I mean this is about crowdsourcing as well so I have to ask questions on crowdsourcing oh because I thought was more I just I prepped them for more of an AI conversation than uh than a crowdsourcing conversation no I'd ra you know I think we should we should I don't really want to do this um yeah we can find someone else to to talk about this stuff okay so you're not comfortable

with with this part of the uh discussion no no I mean it's you're right it is an important part of the conversation I think it's just you know it's not the AI conversation we don't have time to pull up the video Lucas bald makes a hasty exit without saying goodbye and leaves us alone with his head of PR one last chance to ask how the business treats these contractors as they call them here I was when I was working on this I found many people complaining being disconnected uh and I actually have to go now

too uh so it's 11:00 okay so um so you don't want to to speak about human in the that's not that's not my role here so all right I think we're done so only artificial intelligence no human well that's what we were prepared for so sorry okay it's a bity to get some answers to our questions about Lucas balt and his views on his workers we thought we'd try a different tactic [Music] on the day the figure8 founder made his statement on disposable workers there were other entrepreneurs amongst him as well as a researcher Lily

Irani just on the [Music] right 10 years after the conference we find Lily living south of Los Angeles [Music] California Lily Irani teaches at the University of San Diego and one of her specialist subjects is the working culture of high-tech business we're lucky she has a good memory do you remember if somebody reacted after this sentence which is very brutal in a certain way to be honest the reaction was nothing I remember that panel everyone went up to him to talk to him and two or three people came up to me to talk about the

ethics of this form of Labor this is a room full of Highly Educated people in San Francisco and nobody battered an eyelash how do you explain that you know the kinds of people who have access to these spaces are the kinds of people who never worked in a situation where they wondered if they could make rent or they never worked in a situation where you know somebody gets sick and they can't pay someone to go take care of them so they have to kind of take a really bad job at home or and they they

have no connection to the kinds of situations of the people that are willing to do this work it's what happens when you go to schools like Stanford and Harvard and Princeton that tell you you're the smartest person and you're going to be a future leader and you've been chosen because you're special and that you have the power to change the world a Silicon Valley Elite who is out of touch with the rest of the world this is the key to understanding Lucas bald's logic although it's not the only part these workers are invisible by Design

um you can write code and send your work out never talk to anyone it's designed so you can get the work back on a spread sheeet if you need to you just see these you know letters and numbers identifying the worker You Don't See name you don't see where they live you don't see what their situation is you don't see unless you keep track of it yourself have they worked for you before or not do these ghost workers really know who they work for have they ever heard of Lucas bald we showed them the footage

of the figure8 founder talking about their [Music] work so for example with technology you can actually find them pay them the tiny amount of money um and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore giggling over paying people pennies and yeah byebye okay now I'm going to start arguing what like I do about the AIS when they get me agitated it's kind of surprising I guess a little bit to see they're so openly uh openly talking about that view that they have of the workforce it's I guess it doesn't really surprise me

that much but yeah it it definitely kind of sucks I guess when they could be paying them a lot more or at least showing some appreciation or maybe even some uh some discretion basically he's saying in person you know you hide somebody for 10 minutes and fire them this way you don't have to look at the person and you just goodbye so that's kind of just it is kind of the fact that the head of the company is people are that disposable that really isn't right I don't I don't like that so I like what

I do when I have something to say and I will say it so I'm not disposable amongst this invisible Workforce hiding behind your screen there are those who feed algorithms for next to nothing it's the people in charge of Tiding up the web the social media cleaners who work on sites like Facebook or Instagram these workers are never mentioned in the Slick presentations of the Silicon Valley CEOs I started building a service to do that to put people first and at the center of our experience with technology because our relationships are what matters most us

that's how we find meaning and how we make sense of our place in the world today with two billion users Facebook no longer has anything to do with Mark Zuckerberg's initial vision of the [Music] site with violent videos hate speech and pornographic images more and more content has to be deleted and it isn't always robots doing this job there are once again humans hidden behind the screen determining of something as hate speech is very linguistically nuanced I am optimistic that over a 5 to 10 year period we will have ai tools that can uh get

into some of the nuances the linguistic nuances of of of different types of content to be more accurate and flagging things for our systems but today we're just not there on that so a lot of this is still reactive people flag at us um we we have people look at it these people are in charge of sorting and managing content on the network Facebook called them content reviewers according to their site Facebook has 15,000 workers doing this job across the world in Ireland Portugal the Philippines and the us we contacted Facebook but the company refused

our request for an interview so in order to meet these moderators and understand their role we identified Facebook's main subcontractors multinationals such as majoral cognizant or Accenture we found this job offer for a Content reviewer for the French Market in Portugal Greg is one of the journalists in our team he responded to the ad and was offered the job before taking off he received his contract which included his monthly salary 800 a little over the minimum wage in Portugal with a food allowance of €7 63 a day Facebook isn't mentioned once in the document even

when directly asked Accenture refused to give the client's name I was just wondering uh now that I took the job uh I'm going there I'm I'm doing it I was just wondering you know um if I could know the name of the company I'm going to work for no it's we cannot reveal the name yet it's for one of our customers but we cannot we are not allowed to say the name this is where greguar will be working at the Accenture offices in Lisbon before getting started our journalist was sent to a welcome meeting the

footage is a little shaky as gregar is filming with a hidden camera hello hello I having the meeting with Accentra at 9:30 grea isn't the only new employee 12 other people are starting the role at the same time another French person along with some Italians and Spaniards an HR representative is running the welcome meeting welcome you all my job as career advisor is to help you in all the relationship with the center okay after the vacation documents and social security paperwork the small group finally find out which company they are working for but it's top

secret you must have been told by the recruiting team that you cannot mention that you are working for this project okay the client is really very demanding you cannot mention anyone that you are working for face group okay if someone asks you where you work you work for Accenture okay we still we we have this code name that is that is coo so if I'm talking to some colleague from accent not from this project and he ask me where do I work I cannot tell that I work for Facebook okay this is not allowed it's

completely like confidential that work is that Facebook is working here at this fac okay code names confidentiality Clauses and a complete ban on cell phones Facebook gives you the life of a secret agent for $800 a month and if you're the chatty type the following argument should shut you up pretty quickly you have like an agreement and you cannot break that agreement because by law we can do like we can punish you by law you know it's confidential cleaning up social media is a bit like doing your family's Dirty Laundry it has to be done

but nobody talks about it why so careful what does the job involve we continue discreetly with Gregoire [Music] before becoming a moderator grea has to follow a 3-we training program moderating Facebook's content doesn't only involve deleting violent videos or racist jokes it's a lot more complicated at the moment the algorithms can't handle everything every decision must be justified using very strict rules this is what we learned during the the training every day is dedicated to a different theme during the program for example nudity violent images or hate speech on the agenda today dark humor and

jokes in bad taste we will remove a violation if the person that you see in the image so you need to have a real person is visibly affected if you are making fun of the event there is going to be the what do we do when there's here's an example of an inappropriate joke about 911 it may seem overthe toop but there are dozens of rules like this for each category which can be difficult to get your head around take nudity for example depending on on what part of the body you see or their position

the moderator can't always make the same decision here's an example from the exercises to better explain greguar decided to delete this particular photo but according to Facebook's rules he was wrong to do so in the feedback session the trainer offers this explanation if we cannot see and his head is not here then it's ignore in between her boots so if I don't see directly the contact with the nipple it's nothing know that's exactly why I am having so much trouble to understand things you have an artistic picture of a photograph of a woman and you

show a tiny nipple on it and so on one hand this is a delete because we have 100% uncover nle on the other hand you have this almost pal video and you don't did it because it doesn't Feit the world that's exactly why I yes but you have also a problem because you're still going from what you think in your decisions and we are in school to learn rules applying Facebook's rules without questioning them is the number one rule a principle that will be drilled into you all day every day has to be a l

and they drew it around that okay we just need to respect it and we just need to apply it to do our jobs sometimes we'll find disagreements but I mean this is to good job because this is not my social a training program with the end goal of turning you into a machine see you later Pedro worked for six months as a content reviewer for Facebook at Accenture he agreed to respond to our questions but only if he remained Anonymous two years after leaving the company he still remembers the numbing side of the role you

have to play by their game or else you won't have a job at the end of the month and it's get got to a point where I just felt I was a robot and just doing as many pictures and videos as as much as possible just because I was just that's the only thing I can do you're just there with numbers and clicking enter numbers enter numbers enter the hardest thing for Pedro is trying to forget everything that he saw on that screen over 6 months we're not prepared for it we're not mentally prepared for

it all these stuff they don't really give us the inputs before and it just comes to you as a shock it just comes to you as like a wave here have this in front of you and you can't really say yes or no to it if you give me a million EUR or billion EUR I wouldn't go it's not for me I don't [Music] know what Pedro described to us the wave of shock that washes over you unexpectedly is exactly what happened to Greg gu it started around the fifth day of training during the Practical

exercises a stream of horrific images and unbearable videos that must be watch closely in order to make the right decision according to Facebook's criteria the same horrific scenes are unfolding on his neighbor's screen too excuse me may I take a glass of water it's like this on a daily basis for Greg and his group luckily they can always r Ry on the useful advice of the trainers to feel better if you feel uncomfortable with cont please warn me and a little little break go outside do the macarina and then we'll come back if the macarina

isn't quite enough to cheer you up the business also has psychologists available for the most traumatized moderators on this day a video lasting several minutes brought the violence to another level for gregar during the break everyone tries to shake off the shock by discussing the Grim video they've just witnessed with two guys and they were like playing with a gun and suddenly the shoot the guy but he was like was Clos it Clos yeah at the moment I feel very bad like I don't know but I think that the feeling um didn't last a lot

of time you know it's like at the moment I feel very very very sad I don't know then I can like continue Greg real realizes the extent of the damage this job can cause when talking with a former moderator who is now a trainer and I have trouble like on the street because I just see people being hit like in my brain I see I see so many accidents that like I cannot off everybody who's running across the street like I cannot anymore oh yeah yeah take it yeah it's like kind of a Min you've

got that I mean I don't take medication but I know that like I have to be like this I can't watch people running across the street anyone you're still doing this while you have PTSD there is a purpose I do feel every day like I'm cleaning the trash fromet you know okay I will watch it but at least I know that I'm going to watch it someone who's 14 years old is going to get that and not even two years after quitting the post Pedro still has very Vivid memories of certain videos there's a few

things that I saw those things are going to stay with me because I I remember them as if it was yesterday it's very emotional sometimes I remember sometimes people used to like they were working being productive and suddenly they're just just stand up and run out of the room that's okay because sometimes trauma built up and for Pedro left him feeling helpless but if you see someone getting murdered the only action you take is the leite for example you just erase it out of the the platform you don't really go into depth of like calling

the police for example it's like you never really feel content with what you're doing you're just going round and round in circles and just like bombards with all these stuff so it's like a mixture of emotions that you go through in one day eight hours of for how many were you when you started we we were 30 when we started 30 from that 30 it started just decreasing month by month until now there's only like three people Pedro claims that a lot of people struggle to deal with the role and end up quitting to understand

what Pedro went through and what gregar and his colleagues are currently experiencing we met up with a psychiatrist Professor TI B is a specialist in post-traumatic stress disorder for example he works with police officers who have been involved in terrorist attacks we show him the footage we filmed [Music] certain [Music] [Music] we also talked to him about the famous confidentiality Clauses imposed by Facebook V traa anxiety trauma stress cleaning up social media comes at a great cost Greg decides to quit only two weeks later still in his training [Music] period he received his paycheck just

before leaving his hourly pay written at the top € 462 gross this is a tough pill to swallow for his colleague I was earning more in the ice the ice cream shop man that's bad right after our experience there we contacted Accenture their response was a brief email that didn't once reference Facebook it did however contain this phrase the well-being of our employees is our priority [Music] to finish our tour of the internet's trash cleaners the invisible Workforce behind your Facebook or Instagram feed we had one last meeting Sarah Roberts is the leading researcher specializing

in those who work as moderators she is a key figure in this field we met her at the University where she teaches in California she presented us with an analysis of the rise and development of content moderation over the past [Music] year we are talking about a scope and a scale of magnitude that has not been seen before billions of things shared per day on Facebook hundreds of hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute per day and so on the response has continued to be we'll put more content moderators on it which means that

that is continues to exponentially grow has gone from a next to nothing kind of line item in the budget to being a massive massive cost center meaning it doesn't actually return Revenue it's not like a new product it's just seen as an economic drain and the way we manage that problem is by pushing it onto some low-wage workers to do it as cheaply as possible because again that Stacks up when you double your Workforce in two years that it does not come for free this is why companies like Facebook use subcontractors but according to this

researcher this isn't the only reason it's about labor cost but it's also about creating layers of um lessening responsibility between those who solicit this kind of work and and need it and those who do it and where they do it they remove themselves they put themselves at a distance from the workers and their conditions and it's not just a geographic distance but sort of a moral distance so when that content moderator some years later alleges harm or you know is having trouble psychologically or emotionally because of the work that they did then it may be

possible for that company to disclaim responsibility for that even though ultimately they really are responsible because they asked them to do that work in the first place despite these precautions three former moderators filed lawsuits against Facebook in the US a few months ago all three were working under subcontractors all claimed to be victims of post-traumatic stress disorder the American company refused every request we made for an interview they did however send us an email to explain how Facebook with its Partners pays great attention to the wellbeing of content moderators working on its platform which is

an absolute priority to finish off here's some of the latest news from the sector while these ghost workers are left in the Shadows it's business as usual for the companies working in this new sector a few weeks after filming figure a Founder sold his company for $300 million well at least now he has good reason to be happy [Music]