The Humans in the Machine

IRL: Online Life is Real Life

They’re the essential workers of AI — yet mostly invisible and exploited. Does it have to be this way? Bridget Todd talks to data workers and entrepreneurs pushing for change.

Millions of people work on data used to train AI behind the scenes. Often, they are underpaid and even traumatized by what they see. In this episode: a company charting a different path; a litigator holding big tech accountable; and data workers organizing for better conditions.

Thank you to Foxglove and Superrr for sharing recordings from the the Content Moderators Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in May, 2023.

Richard Mathenge helped establish a union for content moderators after surviving a traumatic experience as a contractor in Kenya training Open AI’s ChatGPT.

Mercy Mutemi is a litigator for digital rights in Kenya who has issued challenges to some of the biggest global tech companies on behalf of hundreds of data workers.

Krista Pawloski is a full time data worker on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform and is an organizer with the worker-led advocacy group, Turkopticon.

Safiya Husain is the co-founder of Karya, a company in India with an alternative business model to compensate data workers at rates that reflect the high value of the data.

IRL: Online Life is Real Life is an original podcast from Mozilla, the non-profit behind Firefox. In Season 7, host Bridget Todd talks to AI builders that put people ahead of profit.