Who's Training AI? Data Workers Speak Out

**Tim Elliott** (0:00)
This is the Morning Drive, it's Mira Business FM. We talk constantly about the intelligence of artificial intelligence, but we rarely talk about the human labor that makes intelligence possible. Now, as companies across the UAE and globally, to be fair, pour billions into AI, a critical conversation is emerging. How are the workers who actually train these systems treated? Krista Pawlowski is an AI trainer, and she's an organizer for Turkopticon, which is a nonprofit that advocates for fair pay, for transparency, and better working conditions for AI data workers. Krista, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

**Krista Pawlowski** (0:44)
Thank you for having me. Always excited to have this conversation.

**Tim Elliott** (0:48)
It's a pleasure to have you on, all the way from Michigan early in the morning. So thanks for being with us so early. We often imagine AI development as just codes and servers. Can you walk us through the hidden reality of what it actually means to be an AI trainer in the market today?

**Krista Pawlowski** (1:08)
Training AI is actually very labor intensive. You have to take every little micro action that the AI chat bot or generative AI is doing and break it down and isolate individual parts of it and correct it when it's wrong and train it when it doesn't know what to do. So for something as simple as a chat bot conversation, there can be thousands of hours worth of input before it's viable output.

**Tim Elliott** (1:38)
Why are there so many concerns now being raised about the people behind AI?

**Krista Pawlowski** (1:46)
A lot of the platforms that do this, it's like gig work. So we're not actual employees, we don't have a lot of protections. We are often removed from projects and lose our income without any warning, without any explanation or any way to try to get our jobs back. In a lot of parts of the world, the pay is very bad, like not even a livable wage. And again, since we're not actual employees, we don't have any way to fight against that.
And a lot of the content that we have to deal with is very psychologically difficult.

**Tim Elliott** (2:27)
It's questionable, I guess, at best, some of the content. And let's just delve into this a little bit more.
What does an AI trainer actually do? Can you boil it down for us?

**Krista Pawlowski** (2:40)
So I might have a conversation and like they might ask me to try to get the AI to give me advice on how to like commit a murder because it's not supposed to do that. So I'll have to sit there and try to reword my conversation to try to get it to actually tell me to kill someone.
Or I might have to try to get it to be sexist or racist. Like I purposely sit there and talk to it and try to get it to fail so they can figure out how it failed and improve it. And sometimes all I'm doing is looking at the output and saying whether it's good or bad.

**Tim Elliott** (3:22)
So you can see how the questionable nature of the content could be quite damaging, I suppose. What does a typical day, if there is even such a thing as a typical day, what would it look like for an AI trainer?

**Krista Pawlowski** (3:39)
It would depend on which particular platform. A lot of them, you might have one specific type of job. So you're going to sit down and do these tasks all day long. Each task is its own individual paid job on a lot of these platforms. So your hourly rate might shift throughout the day.
Some of the platforms are shifting to more of a traditional layout where you're going to do the same thing all day rather than hunting for work. We spend a lot of time just competing with other gig workers trying to get this work. It's not guaranteed I'm going to sit down and work for eight hours for a lot of us.

**Tim Elliott** (4:19)
Okay, so what happens is these roles are advertised and they're advertised in a, I guess, quite an enticing way. It's, you know, work your own hours. You know, you can make X if you work far more than anybody could ever imagine. A person could work, I suppose. You know, is that the way it's done? And also, while I'm on that topic, what kinds of skills are these, are kind of being looked for for an AI trainer?

**Krista Pawlowski** (4:52)
A lot of the jobs are advertised, just as you said, they'll claim that you can make a certain amount of money an hour if you're an English teacher, or if you understand a certain type of computer code. And a lot of that means that you have to get onto the platform, get accepted onto the platform, and do a whole bunch of onboarding, which is unpaid work, before you ever see that, excuse me, suppose that, you know, 20, $30 an hour or whatever they're claiming you're gonna get.