The human extractivism behind AI: underpaid data workers who make chatbots sound human
MilagrosMiceli · x · 2026-09-10
A Pikara Magazine report (amplified by Milagros Miceli) details the 'human extractivism' behind AI: underpaid workers in Bulgaria, Syria, Kenya and Argentina produce training data — writing checklists, rating annotations and producing reasoning traces for models like Gemini and Claude.
- Precarious, low-paid work makes unionizing or reporting unethical practices risky
- Workers come mostly from poor, marginalized communities (refugees, prisoners, migrants); women earn less, get the worst assignments and face gender violence, per data-workers.org
- The article argues this exploitation is invisibilized to hide the industry's contradictions, while workers organize against it.
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