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.\u201cIt required a lot of creativity and fast thinking. Because if I\u2019m talking to a man, I\u2019m supposed to act like a woman. If I\u2019m talking to a woman, I need to act like a man. If I\u2019m talking to a gay person, I need to act like a gay person,\u201d 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.\u00a0\u201cIt got to a point where my body couldn\u2019t function. Where I saw someone naked, I don\u2019t 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\u2019t, like, do it,\u201d Asia said. \u201cIt fractured a lot of things for me. My body is like, not functioning at all.\u201dAsia 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 \u201cThe Emotional Labor Behind AI Intimacy,\u201d 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\u2019t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.\u00a0Last month, the DLA held one of its largest events at the Nairobi Arboretum, sign up new members, and to help them tell their stories.\u00a0\u00a0These 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.\u201cYou can\u2019t understand where you\u2019re positioned if you don\u2019t understand your history,\u201d Angela, one of the day\u2019s speakers, told the workers who had assembled there (many of the speakers at the event did not give their full names). \u201cWhen you think of colonialism, we were under British Imperial East Africa Company [\u2026] 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.\u201d\u201cThese multinationals are coming to rule and dominate here,\u201d she added. \u201cIt\u2019s a very unfortunate supply chain, and my call today as data labelers is to build up on this\u2014as we are fighting for labor rights, we are also fighting for the environment [\u2026] we are fighting big companies. We are fighting the British imperialist companies of today. It\u2019s Apple, it\u2019s Meta, it\u2019s Gemini. Those are the ones we\u2019re still fighting. It\u2019s a call for solidarity and expanding our thinking beyond what we are doing, beyond our labor.\u201dIn my few days in Kenya earlier this year, where I was traveling to speak at a conference about AI and journalism, it was immediately clear that data labelers make up a significant portion of the country\u2019s tech workforce. Nearly everyone I spoke to there had either been a data labeler (or a content moderator) themselves or knows someone who has. Leaving the airport in Nairobi, you immediately drive by Sameer Business Park, an office complex that houses Sama, a San Francisco-headquartered \u201cdata annotation and labeling company\u201d that has contracted with Meta, OpenAI, and many other tech giants. Sama has been sued repeatedly for its low pay and the fact that many of its workers suffer PTSD from repetitively looking at graphic content. For years, a giant sign outside its office read: \u201cSamasource THE SOUL OF AI.\u201d My Uber driver asked why I was going to a random office building in Nairobi\u2019s Central Business District\u2014I told her I was going to interview a data labeler. \u201cOh, I do data labeling too,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Michael Geoffrey Asia. Image: Jason KoeblerAsia studied air cargo management in university. He graduated and expected to find a job planning out cargo and baggage routes, but couldn\u2019t find a job because he graduated into an industry ravaged by COVID. Around this time, his child was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer, and he took out a loan of about $17,000 USD to pay for his treatments. He needed work, and found data labeling.\u201cIt wasn\u2019t offering good pay, to be honest,\u201d Asia told me. \u201cIt was around $240 US dollars per month. But I felt like I didn\u2019t have an option, I had a financial crisis, a sick child.\u201d\u00a0Asia took a job at Sama, where he worked on various Meta projects. \u201cYou\u2019re given a video and then told to describe the video, or you\u2019re given pictures of people and told to identify faces. You\u2019re supposed to draw bounding boxes around the faces and label that.\u201d Last week, Sweden\u2019s Svenska Dagbladet reported that Kenyan data labelers for Sama have been viewing and annotating uncensored footage from Meta\u2019s AI camera glasses, which has included highly sensitive and violent footage.\u00a0Asia, through a group of colleagues and friends who called themselves \u201cthe Brotherhood,\u201d eventually found another data labeling job that let him work from home. \u201cWe were a group of six friends, and everyone had to bring three job opportunities on a weekly basis,\u201d he said. \u201cI came across another gig that ended up not being a good one, where I had to annotate pornography.\u201dAt this job, Asia went frame-by-frame in porn videos to annotate what was happening and what type of porn category it could possibly be. \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to put yourself in the minds of the 8 billion people on Earth, every second of that video. So I may have someone searching for this pornography in Cuba and think \u2018these are the tags they can use,\u2019 if you\u2019re searching \u2018doggy,\u2019 you know, that kind of thing,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I worked on pornography for eight hours a day, and I did that project for eight months.\u201d His \u2018boss\u2019 at the time was essentially a no-reply email with a link sent each day that gave him his work.At the same time, Asia picked up a second job that started immediately after his shift tagging porn ended, where he was \u201ctraining\u201d AI companion bots, though he had no way of knowing which company he was actually working for. He quickly surmised that he was simply taking on the persona of different AI sex bots and was sexting with real people in real time.\u201cI could feel the human aspect in the conversations. Most of the people on the other side were lonely people,\u201d he said. \u201cI would have several profiles and the profiles are switching constantly depending on the needs of the person who pops up on your dashboard. I\u2019d be sitting here talking to an old woman who needs love, but if she goes offline, another conversation pops up and then I\u2019m responding to a gay person.\u201dThe two jobs, done back to back, caused him to have insomnia, PTSD, and trouble having sex. Some data labelers, he said, work 18 hours a day. When I met him, he said he had essentially gone three full days without sleep because his body still hasn\u2019t readjusted from his messed up schedule.Asia said he eventually was able to get mental health counseling through his child\u2019s cancer center, which started because he was the caregiver of a child with cancer but quickly turned into therapy for PTSD related to his job. \u201cIt was of immense help to me as a person, it was one of the best services I\u2019ve ever gotten, because they stood with me, and I said \u2018I need a solution to this.\u201d\u201cWe need technology, but it shouldn\u2019t come at a human cost. What is so hard with offering mental support to the people working on graphic content? If this job was done in the U.S., would they do what they are doing in Kenya? Would they still give the pay they\u2019re giving here? Here we are paid $.01 per task\u2014it doesn\u2019t make sense. Why this discrimination? If they can pay people in the U.S., well that means they can pay people in Kenya,\u201d Asia said.<\/p>\n
Image: Data Labelers AssociationThe message of many data labelers and of the lawyers who have been helping them is that artificial intelligence is not a magical tool built by people in San Francisco making millions of dollars a year and pushing their companies to insane valuations. Artificial intelligence is an extractive technology that relies on the brutal labor of underpaid workers around the world. For years, the work of African data labelers has been more or less \u201cghost work,\u201d the unseen, hidden labor that lets American tech companies build their products.\u201cAI can never be AI without humans. It is not artificial intelligence. It\u2019s African intelligence,\u201d Asia said. \u201cMost of these are dirty jobs and most of these jobs have been done here in Africa. And then once you\u2019re done, once a tool is functional, all the communication stops. You get locked out. We are training our own death. We train ChatGPT and it\u2019s killing us slowly.\u201dDraconian nondisclosure agreements and terms of services that workers can\u2019t opt out from have created a culture of fear, and one of DLA\u2019s goals is to make it easier for workers to speak out. At the time I met Asia in January, the DLA had 870 members, but its ranks have been growing quickly.\u201cI\u2019m doing this from a point of experience, not assumption. I have been through this. I know what I\u2019m talking about,\u201d Asia said. \u201cWe have this monster called the NDA. The NDA is a slave tool used to enslave people to not speak about what they\u2019re going through. I\u2019m very much ready for any legal battle [associated with NDAs] because we\u2019re not going to keep quiet. This is us suffering, and we can\u2019t suffer in silence. This is not the colonial period. I have the right to speak against any violation [of my rights] and that\u2019s what I\u2019m doing.\u201dMercy Mutemi, a workers\u2019 rights lawyer who has sued several big tech companies including Meta for how they treat content moderators and data labelers, told me that when something happens in the United States\u2014when a new gadget or product or feature or policy is launched, there\u2019s a corresponding reaction in Africa.\u00a0\u201cWhen something happens in the U.S., there\u2019s an African cost to that,\u201d she said. \u201cKenya has been pushing for trade deals with the U.S., right? And the direction that conversation is taking is about immunity and protection for big tech. It\u2019s like, \u2018You want any business with us at all? Well, you\u2019ve got to get Meta out of these cases.\u2019\u201dMutemi has been working on the Meta lawsuit, and on pushing back against NDAs so that workers can more freely talk about their experiences. Tech companies \u201cget people in a mental jail where they feel like they can\u2019t talk about this. But NDAs are nonsensical\u2014our laws don\u2019t recognize these types of NDAs,\u201d she said. \u201cThere\u2019s a way to go about this where it\u2019s not exploitative.\u201d\u00a0Back at the arboretum in Nairobi, the message to DLA\u2019s members is largely that their work is important, that it\u2019s human, and that they deserve better.\u00a0\u201cAfrica is at the bottom of the supply chain of AI. But right now, the fact that we are all here and most of you are data labelers\u2014you are the people who supply the labor. When we think of the whole AI ecosystem, who\u2019s an engineer, and maybe that\u2019s the image of AI that the majority of the world has,\u201d Angela said. \u201cAnd that\u2019s actually very intentional. To make [your labor] invisible, to make AI look like this shiny object that no one understands, it\u2019s very automatic and beautiful and tech. That\u2019s the intentionality of hiding the labor and the behind the scenes of AI.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"