Submission + - The Ghost Workers Teaching Silicon Valleyâ(TM)s Machines to Think (aylgorith.com)
commodore73 writes: Quoting author:
Meet Junbee.
Every night from 8pm to 5am, he sits in an overcrowded internet café in the Philippines, teaching ChatGPT how to think.
For this work that powers Silicon Valley's $29 billion AI empire, he earns less than $6 a day.
While tech CEOs debate "superintelligence" at Davos, 10 million workers across Kenya, Venezuela, and the Philippines perform the invisible labor that makes AI possible. They are the ghosts in the machine, hidden behind platforms like Remotasks, their humanity packaged and sold as "artificial" intelligence.
I spent months investigating this hidden workforce. What I found will change how you see every AI interaction:
ðY' Scale AI charges companies $100 for expert annotations while paying workers $0.01
ðY" Filipino workers saw wages drop from $10 per task to less than 1 cent
â Months of unpaid work is "commonplace" according to internal messages
ðYOE A deliberate "race to the bottom" pits desperate workers against each other globally
The most stunning revelation? When Meta invested $14.8 billion in Scale AI last June, work dried up overnight for thousands. One contractor told me: "The fact that there's nothing else to work on right now just sucks."
This isn't just about one company. Every ChatGPT response, every Tesla autopilot decision, every content moderation action depends on this hidden army of workers. They teach AI to be ethical while being subjected to deeply unethical treatment themselves.
As someone from the Global South, this story hits differently. We're not just consumers of AI technology, we're the invisible infrastructure making it possible, one underpaid click at a time.
The future is being built on our backs, but our voices remain unheard.
Meet Junbee.
Every night from 8pm to 5am, he sits in an overcrowded internet café in the Philippines, teaching ChatGPT how to think.
For this work that powers Silicon Valley's $29 billion AI empire, he earns less than $6 a day.
While tech CEOs debate "superintelligence" at Davos, 10 million workers across Kenya, Venezuela, and the Philippines perform the invisible labor that makes AI possible. They are the ghosts in the machine, hidden behind platforms like Remotasks, their humanity packaged and sold as "artificial" intelligence.
I spent months investigating this hidden workforce. What I found will change how you see every AI interaction:
ðY' Scale AI charges companies $100 for expert annotations while paying workers $0.01
ðY" Filipino workers saw wages drop from $10 per task to less than 1 cent
â Months of unpaid work is "commonplace" according to internal messages
ðYOE A deliberate "race to the bottom" pits desperate workers against each other globally
The most stunning revelation? When Meta invested $14.8 billion in Scale AI last June, work dried up overnight for thousands. One contractor told me: "The fact that there's nothing else to work on right now just sucks."
This isn't just about one company. Every ChatGPT response, every Tesla autopilot decision, every content moderation action depends on this hidden army of workers. They teach AI to be ethical while being subjected to deeply unethical treatment themselves.
As someone from the Global South, this story hits differently. We're not just consumers of AI technology, we're the invisible infrastructure making it possible, one underpaid click at a time.
The future is being built on our backs, but our voices remain unheard.
