Initially it is a September 2019 French TV program Cash Investigation that you can see on Youtube. It lasts 2 hours and contains several interviews in English. The producers have adapted a 52 minutes feature film format available on Vimeo (I have not seen it) with the title Ghost Workers. The program focuses on the bike riders for ubereats, the content reviewers working for Facebook via Accenture, labelers working for Google via Figure Eight. The segment about the Figure Eight CEO, Lucas Biewald is amazing, as is the quest to interview the CEO of Facebook France, running away (on camera) from the journalist trying to interview him.
I have pointed where you can look for those segments in my notes below but I have not found the time to organize them better. Sorry. But this is worth seeing. It exposes the disgusting overexploitative side of AI and the millions made on the back of the ghost workers :(
High points of the TV program on Youtube
at 38 minutes, story of Franck Page, ubereats bike rider killed in Bordeaux.
at 45 minutes, former managers... explaining about the GPS made for car driving, not bikes... at 47 minutes, not a day without an accident in Belgium (in 2017). At 50 minutes the CEO declines to meet. "We'll answer in writing": they never do.
At 58 minutes, interesting interview with an AI specialist for Google in Zurich. Praises the supposed benefits of AI/machine learning but not a word about the human labelers who are indispensable and overexploited by contractors like Figure Eight in San Francisco. Lucas Biewald, the then Figure Eight CEO, declines to answer the questions about them: how much per label? 10 cents per label... how many 'labelers'? about 100.000 ? where do they live? all over. It took the journalists.months to find workers willing to testify and tell how little they are paid: see at 1 hour 08 1.08 en 30 minutes 180 questions so 30 cents!
Not at all good pay 1.15... $250 per month for full time work.
click worker, amazon mechanical turk, "micro work"
Janine Berg OIT. ( 2018 report available pdf, digital labor platforms and the future of work: towards decent work in the online world is a bit technical. Back to Biewald at1h19 with a shocking statement given in 2010 during a conference at the Common Wealth Club : with the internet you can hire people very easily, have them work ten minutes, pay them very little, and get rid of them when you don't need them any more... I retrieved the link to this 2010 talk devoted to "crowdsourcing'. You can find his comment at 5 minutes. The presenter, Brad Stone, has no clue about what 'reviewing' porn images full time represents... they all make it like a few minutes jobs but those are not. The only true part is they are paid very little. At 1 hour 24 Lilly Irani of U San Diego Ethics and working conditions showing Biewald statement to workers! At 1hour 25, what Google has to say, at 1hour 27 Olivier Bousquet not at ease when confronted to the exploited workers who feed AI...
1h33 Toronto worker for Amazon: training a drone to kill people Maven project by Google later stopped
1h37 Segments about FB: FB Zuckerberg. About the 'content reviewer": 15K of them (admitted)
FB declined to answer... who are the contractors... 800 euros par mois Accenture training for Google in Portugal... FB never mentioned
1hour 39 (we cannot give the name). 1.41 threat about confidentiality
3 weeks of training... FB makes the rules and that's it 1h44
1h46 Post traumatic stress 1h47 horrible images!!! people still impacted years later
high level of attrition
1h52. psy Thierry Baubet
1h54 After 2 weeks, when he leaves the training, the pay of the Cash Investigation journalist is 4 euros brut per hour!!
Sarah Roberts researcher about 'moderators" 1h55. UCLA book Behind the screen 2h01 They track the CEO Laurent Solly at a public event and he flees refusing to answer: an amazing segment...
at the end of the show reference to a special issue of a french weekly magazine about the new web based proletariat
issue 26 September 2019
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