„KI ist afrikanischer Geheimdienst“: Die Arbeiter, die KI trainieren, wehren sich

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. 

“It got to a point where my body couldn’t function. Where I saw someone naked, I don’t even feel it. And I have a wife, who expects a lot from you, a young family, she expects a lot from you intimately. But you can’t, like, do it,” Asia said. “It fractured a lot of things for me. My body is like, not functioning at all.”

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](https://data-workers.org/michael/?ref=404media.co),” 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. 

Last month, the DLA held one of its largest events at the Nairobi Arboretum, sign up new members, and to help them tell their stories.  

These workers are required to stare at horrific content for many hours straight with few mental health resources, are largely managed by opaque algorithms, and, crucially, are the workers powering the runaway valuations of some of the richest and most powerful companies in the world.

Read more: [https://www.404media.co/ai-is-african-intelligence-the-workers-who-train-ai-are-fighting-back/](https://www.404media.co/ai-is-african-intelligence-the-workers-who-train-ai-are-fighting-back/)

Every „tech innovation“ of the last decade has just been hiding labor arbitrage behind a wall of bullshit.

No company reaches mega wealth without exploitation.

It’s a little too late to fight back now isn’t it? After you already trained the best AI models

99% are most likely very happy to have the job, but some journalist probably worked very hard to make a bused story because they know that feeding the rabble what they want to hear is the easiest way to make money.

No one cared when Africans didn’t like other jobs or not having a job but more you’re all going to be sipping on your slave labour coffee and slave labour chocolate wearing your sweatshop made Nike, iPhone with central African Republic slave labour minerals …

But now it lines up with the thing you want an excuse to dislike so you’ll play the woe begotten bleeding heart.