#680 [Redacted Tonight] - The Hidden Workers Behind AI

Microwork is a rising form of labor exploitation being deployed by some of the world’s wealthiest capitalists. It’s online work where users are asked to perform menial, small tasks for pennies. Naomi Karavani takes on the phenomenon and shows us the victims of the industry. The low-paid work includes tasks like identifying the contents of images, translating, transcribing audio, or any task that someone on the site is willing to pay for. These tasks can become abusive where workers have been sexually harassed by the people setting the tasks. Jeff Bezos has a company called Mechanical Turk that competes for microwork jobs. Vulnerable people such as refugees and those living in occupied territories are the target worker for the microwork industry.