After giving birth to her second child, Chelsea Becker took an unpaid, one-year 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 several hours every day, Ms. Becker, 33, who lives in Schwenksville, Pa., sits at his laptop and interacts with an AI-powered chatbot. For each hour of work, he is paid $20 to $40. From December to March, he earned over $10,000.
The boom in AI technology has put a more sophisticated spin on a type of gig work that doesn’t require leaving the house. The growth of large language models like the technology that powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT has fueled the need for trainers like Ms. Becker, fluent English speaker who can produce quality writing.
It’s no secret that AI models learn from humans. For years, makers of AI systems such as Google and OpenAI have relied on low-paid workers, usually contractors working for other companies, to help computers visually see subjects. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, with claims of copyright infringement.) They can label cars and pedestrians for self-driving cars or identify images in images used to train AI systems.
But as AI technology becomes more sophisticated, so does the job of humans who must carefully teach it. Yesterday’s photo tagger is today’s essay writer.
There are typically two types of jobs for these trainers: supervised learning, where the AI learns from human-generated input, and reinforcement learning from human feedback, where the chatbot learns from how people rate their responses.
Companies that specialize 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 AI models, such as Toronto-based start-up Cohere, are too new affiliate 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, Remotasks and Outlier, says it’s not uncommon to see thousands of people working on the platform at a given time.
But like other types of gig work, the ease of flexible hours comes with its own challenges. Some workers said they were never contacted by the administrators behind the recruitment sites, and others were cut from work without explanation. The researchers also expressed concerns over the lack of standards, as workers typically do not receive training on what are considered appropriate chatbot responses.
To become one of these contractors, workers have to pass an assessment, which includes questions such as whether a post on social media should be considered hateful, and why. Another takes a more creative approach, asking contracting prospects to write a fictional short story about a green dancing octopus, set in Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX offices on Nov. 8, 2022. (That was the day Binance, an FTX competitor, said it would buy Mr. Bankman-Fried’s company before quickly backing out of the deal.)
Sometimes, companies are looking for subject matter experts. Scaled AI posted jobs for contract writers with master’s or doctoral degrees in Hindi and Japanese. Outlier has job listings that mention requirements such as academic degrees in math, chemistry and physics.
“What really makes AI useful to its users is the human data layer, and that really needs to be done by smart people and skilled people and people with a certain level of expertise and creative bent,” Willow said. Primack, vice president of data operations at Scale AI. “We are focusing on contractors, especially within 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 who considered AI a threat. So when he saw a video on TikTok about Data Annotation Tech, part of his motivation was just to learn as much about AI as he could and see for himself if the fears surrounding AI were justified.
“It gives me a completely different perspective on it now that I’m working here,” said Ms. Fenske, 28, who lives in Oakley, Wis. “It’s comforting to know there are people behind it.” Since February, she has been aiming for 15 hours of data annotation work per week to support herself while pursuing a writing career.
Ese Agboh, 28, a master’s student studying computer science at the University of Arkansas, was given work coding projects, which paid $40 to $45 an hour. He will ask the chatbot to design a motion sensor program that helps gymgoers count their repetitions, and then analyze the computer code written by the AI. In another case, he will load a data set about of grocery items in the program and will ask the chatbot to design. monthly budget. Sometimes he even checks other annotators’ codes, which experts say is used to ensure data quality.
He earned $2,500. But his account was permanently suspended by the platform for violating its code of conduct. He did not receive an explanation, but he suspected it was because he had worked while in Nigeria, as the site required workers based in only a few countries.
That’s the main challenge of online gig work: It can disappear at any time. With no help available, frustrated contractors turned to social media, sharing their experiences on Reddit and TikTok. Jackie Mitchell, 26, has gained a large following on TikTok thanks to her content side hustles, including data annotation work.
“I get the appeal,” he says, referring to side hustles as an “unfortunate necessity” in this economy and “a sign of my generation and the generation above me.”
Public records show that Surge AI owns Data Annotation Tech. Neither the company nor its chief executive, Edwin Chen, responded to requests for comments.
It is common for companies to hire contractors through subsidiaries. They do this to protect their customers’ identities, and it helps them avoid bad press related to working conditions for low-wage contract workers, said James Muldoon, a University management professor. of Essex whose research focuses on working with AI data.
Most data workers today rely on wages from their gig work. Milagros Miceli, a sociologist and computer scientist who researches working conditions in data work, says that while “a lot of people do it for fun, because of the gamification that comes with it,” most of the work is “still done by workers. who really need money and make it their main income.”
Researchers are also concerned about the lack of safety standards in data labeling. Workers are sometimes asked to address sensitive issues such as whether certain events or actions should be considered genocide or what gender should appear in an AI-generated image of a soccer team, but they are not trained to how to do that analysis.
“It’s fundamentally a bad idea to outsource or crowdsource concerns about safety and ethics,” Professor Muldoon said. “You have to be guided by principles and values, and what your company really decides is the right thing to do on a particular issue.”
