After the birth of her second child, Chelsea Becker took a year’s unpaid leave from her full-time job as a flight attendant. After watching a video on TikTok, he found a side hustle: training artificial intelligence models for a website called Data Annotation Tech.
For a few hours each day, Ms. Becker, 33, who lives in Schwenksville, Pa., sat at her laptop and interacted with an AI-powered chatbot. For each hour of work, he was paid from 20 to 40 dollars. From December to March, he earned over $10,000.
The explosion of AI technology has taken a more sophisticated turn into a kind of gig that doesn’t require leaving the house. The development of large language models, such as the technology powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has fueled the need for instructors like Ms. Becker, fluent English speakers who can produce quality writing.
It’s no secret that AI models learn from humans. For years, makers of artificial intelligence systems like Google and OpenAI have relied on low-wage workers, usually contractors employed through other companies, to help computers visually identify subjects. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, over claims of copyright infringement.) They might tag vehicles and pedestrians for self-driving cars, or recognize images in photos used to train AI systems.
But as AI technology has become more sophisticated, so has the job of the people who have to painstakingly teach it. Yesterday’s photo tagger is today’s essayist.
There are typically two types of work for these trainers: supervised learning, where the AI learns from human-generated writing, and reinforcement learning from human feedback, where the chatbot learns from how people rate responses their.
Companies specializing in data curation, including San Francisco-based start-ups Scale AI and Surge AI, hire contractors and sell their training data to larger developers. Developers of artificial intelligence models, such as Toronto-based start-up Cohere, also hire in-house data annotators.
It is difficult to estimate the total number of these gig workers, the researchers said. But Scale AI, which hires contractors through its subsidiaries Retasks and Outlier, said it’s common to see tens of thousands of people working on the platform at any given time.
But as with other types of gigs, the convenience of flexible hours comes with its own challenges. Some workers said they never interacted with the managers behind the recruiting sites, and others were cut from their jobs without explanation. Researchers have also raised concerns about a lack of standards, as employees typically don’t receive training on what are considered appropriate chatbot responses.
To become one of these contractors, employees must pass an assessment, which includes questions such as whether a social media post should be considered hate speech and why. Another requires a more creative approach, asking contract holders to write a fictional short story about a dancing green octopus set in Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX offices on November 8, 2022. (That was the day Binance said, an FTX competitor would buy Mr. Bankman-Fried’s company before he later quickly backed out of the deal.)
Sometimes, companies look for subject matter experts. Scale AI has posted jobs for contract writers who hold Masters or PhDs in Hindi and Japanese. Outlier has job listings that list requirements such as academic degrees in math, chemistry and physics.
“What really makes AI useful to its users is the human layer of data, and that really has to be done by smart people and skilled people and people with a certain degree of expertise and creative bent,” said Willow Primack, vice president. of data operations in Scale AI. “We’ve focused on contractors, particularly in North America, as a result.”
Alynzia Fenske, a self-published fiction writer, had never interacted with an AI chatbot before hearing a lot from fellow writers about AI as a threat. So when she came across a TikTok video about Data Annotation Technology, part of her motivation was simply to learn as much as she could about AI and see for herself if the fears surrounding AI were justified.
“It gives me a whole different perspective on it now that I’m working on it,” said Ms. Fenske, 28, who lives in Oakley, Wis. “It’s comforting to know there are human beings behind it.” As of February, she’s aiming for 15 hours of data annotation work each week so she can support herself while pursuing a writing career.
Ese Agboh, 28, a graduate student studying computer science at the University of Arkansas, was tasked with coding projects, which paid $40 to $45 an hour. It asked the chatbot to design a motion sensor program that helps exercisers count their repetitions, and then it would evaluate the computer codes written by the AI. monthly budget. Sometimes it even reviewed other commenters’ codes, which experts say are used to ensure data quality.
He won $2,500. But her account was permanently suspended by the platform for violating its code of conduct. He received no explanation, but suspected it was because he was working while in Nigeria, as the site only wanted workers based in certain countries.
This is the fundamental challenge of the online gig: It can disappear at any moment. With no one available to help, frustrated contractors turned to social media, sharing their experiences on Reddit and TikTok. Jackie Mitchell, 26, has gained a huge following on TikTok for her side hustle content, including her data annotation work.
“I enjoy the appeal,” she said, referring to side hustles as an “unfortunate necessity” in this economy and “a trait of my generation and the generation above me.”
Public records show that Surge AI owns Data Annotation Tech. Neither the company nor its CEO, Edwin Chen, responded to requests for comment.
It is common for companies to hire contractors through affiliates. They do this to protect their customers’ identities and it helps them avoid bad press related to working conditions for its low-wage contract workers, said James Muldoon, a professor of management at the University of Essex whose research focuses on data work. AI.
The majority of today’s data workers depend on their gig wages. Milagros Miceli, a sociologist and computer scientist who researches working conditions in data work, said that while “a lot of people do this for fun, because of the gamification that comes with it,” a larger part of the work is still “done by workers who really they need the money and they do this as their main income.”
Researchers are also concerned about the lack of security standards in data labeling. Workers are sometimes asked to address sensitive issues such as whether certain events or acts should be considered genocide or what gender should appear in an AI-generated image of a soccer team, but they are not trained in how to make that assessment.
“It’s fundamentally not a good idea to outsource or outsource to the public safety and ethics concerns,” Professor Muldoon said. “You have to be guided by principles and values, and what your company really decides is right about a particular issue.”
