AI Is a Lot of Work

As the technology becomes ubiquitous, a vast tasker underclass is emerging and not going anywhere.

- By Josh Dzieza. Photo-Ilustration by Paul Sahre

A few months after graduating from college in Nairobi, a 30-year-old I'll call Joe got a job as an annotator-the tedious work of processing the raw information used to train artificial intelligence. AI learns by finding patterns in enormous quantities of data, but first that data has to be sorted and tagged by people, a vast workforce mostly hidden behind the machines. In Joe's case, he was labeling footage for self-driving cars-identifying every vehicle, pedestrian, cyclist, anything a driver needs to be aware of frame by frame and from every possible camera angle. It's difficult and repetitive work. A several-second blip of footage took eight hours to annotate, for which Joe was paid about $10.

Then, in 2019, an opportunity arose: Joe could make four times as much running an annotation boot camp for a new company that was hungry for labelers. Every two weeks, 50 new recruits would file into an office building in Nairobi to begin their apprenticeships. There seemed to be limitless demand for the work. They would be asked to categorize clothing seen in mirror selfies, look through the eyes of robot vacuum cleaners to determine which rooms they were in, and draw squares around lidar scans of motorcycles. Over half of Joe's students usually dropped out before the boot camp was finished. "Some people don't know how to stay in one place for long," he explained with gracious understatement. Also, he acknowledged, "it is very boring."