A know-your-enemy impulse prompted me to apply. In early 2024, I was horrified and fascinated by generative AI \u2013 at its queasy-making attempts at art and the hollow positivity of chatbots. There was also its hungry disregard for copyright, privacy and data sovereignty; the sense it was \u201ccoming for our jobs\u201d; and \u2013 in the media \u2013 doom-filled prophecies of super-intelligent AI escaping human control<\/a>. (Even the billionaires developing AI had trumpeted that risk<\/a>.).\u00a0<\/p>\n It began with a mass recruitment message in my LinkedIn inbox: Want well-paid flexible work? The company was looking for postgraduates to train leading-edge AI models, and my profile was a great fit!<\/p>\n I thought, why not poke the beast and see what happens?<\/p>\n I sent them my CV and soon received: \u201cCongratulations \u2026 you\u2019ve been selected to participate in our advanced generalists program!\u201d I was to verify my ID, watch an onboarding video, then \u201cjoin our paid Enablement Program to set you up for project success!\u201d<\/p>\n More onboardings and thrilled automated emails of congratulations followed. There were Slack channels to join, and long google docs to read about how to rate AI models\u2019 responses across categories like accuracy, instruction following, writing style and safety. Lastly, an online assessment.\u00a0<\/p>\n I got US $350 (NZ $550\u2013$600) for the onboarding, which took seven or eight hours all up \u2013 similar to an average freelance editor\u2019s rate.\u00a0<\/p>\n My memories of my first days \u2013 spent staring into a screenful of Slack channels \u2013 have transmuted into something physical: I was milling around at some kind of huge, noisy station, with hundreds of others, all loudly confused about what to do and where to go. Then suddenly I was herded to a place where about 30 others were working and conversing more calmly. I\u2019d been chosen, for some reason, to join \u201cDana\u2019s squad\u201d.<\/p>\n Our first project involved each trawling the internet for public-domain images, then thinking up prompts that would require a chatbot to interpret and reason about them. For example, you could ask for stats to be pulled from a timeline or a graph and then compared, or choose a simple puzzle, then ask for step-by-step instructions to solve it, or you could find a royal family tree and ask for relationships between particular members.<\/p>\n Lastly, we wrote our own ideal chatbot response to the prompt. This constituted a \u201ctask\u201d. Sometimes you were asked for single-turn tasks (one prompt and response), and sometimes for multi-turn. Finding an image for a multi-turn task was often challenging \u2013 it needed enough detail to support two or three completely different questions, each building on the last without being repetitive.<\/p>\n Every task was reviewed and audited before going to the anonymous client who used it to train their AI model.<\/p>\n As soon as we began any task on the company platform, a timer ticked. I recall we initially had up to three hours for multi-turn tasks, but when you factored in finding the image, it was tight. Some of us started finding images first, unpaid.<\/p>\n Sometimes I\u2019d hit submit with less than a minute to go, sweating, my heart racing. I wasn\u2019t the only one. If you timed out before submitting (which sometimes happened simply because of a platform glitch), you could lose hours of work and wouldn\u2019t be paid for it. At the same time, if you rushed a task and submitted \u201clow quality\u201d, you\u2019d get bad reviewer scores. The company kept close track of our quality and speed metrics, and we were threatened with getting kicked off projects if they got too low.<\/p>\n Dana once told me over Zoom \u2013 reluctantly \u2013 that although my task quality was high, my speed was being looked on unfavourably. I wasn\u2019t supposed to use all the available time. How time metrics worked or what I should work towards, I never found out.<\/p>\n We felt lucky to have Dana, though. She was genuinely lovely. She explained instructions as clearly as she could, facilitated conversations with empathy. We had regular calls with her, and her DMs were always open. She got us feeling like a team.\u00a0<\/p>\n We also banded together in our own private chats, trying to cope with the chaos. Instructions constantly changed \u2013 sometimes drastically, always without warning. Though Dana was frank, she was only one rung above us in the hierarchy, and often as in the dark as we were. We only knew what the next person up told us, and it seemed to be a vertical hierarchy, with blindsides all the way down.<\/p>\n One day, our hourly rates suddenly dropped from US $40 to $35. Another, the company shortened the time we got to do tasks at full rate, and gave us some extra time to complete them at barely minimum wage.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then, one morning, just two months after I\u2019d joined, I woke to a message from Ruth, my best mate there: \u201cDana\u2019s been furloughed!\u201d<\/p>\n Dana\u2019s Slack account had been deactivated, but someone had her phone number. We texted messages of support, and Ruth rallied us to contact the helpdesk asking the company to bring her back.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, we were powerless. This is how it worked. Out with the old, in with the new. Affected people often believed their jobs were safe until the day they were let go. I still have a reply from Dana, saying she looked forward to finding work at a company that treated workers decently.<\/p>\n Over the following months, I got shifted from team to team, project to project. Promises that projects would last a few weeks were constantly broken \u2013 work I\u2019d counted on could vanish within days of such an assurance, the project suspended indefinitely. My pay (like most people\u2019s I knew) dropped by $5 increments until it was $25 an hour for a set number of minutes, then around $14 an hour for another before you timed out. On many projects, company expectations meant you had no option but to continue on the lower rate, do unpaid prep, submit a low-quality task, or all three. And increasingly, training for new projects was unpaid \u2013 sometimes hours of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n I knew I needed to leave, but I\u2019d become dependent on the work. That\u2019s the thing: so many people I\u2019ve met who do this work really need it.<\/p>\n Late one night, I was undertaking yet another unpaid training, and suddenly, I couldn\u2019t do it any more. My brain and body wouldn\u2019t let me even read the instructions. So I stopped \u2013 a luxury not everyone has.<\/p>\n I\u2019m still feeling the loss of the income, and some weeks I struggle, because yes, generative AI \u2013 and the general employment climate \u2013 is coming for my bread-and-butter editing work. But I\u2019m free of the stress of working for this particular company, and of knowing I\u2019m so directly contributing to the way the biggest AI companies are causing harm.<\/p>\n Over 18 months, I saw that it isn\u2019t AI we should fear, but the handful of billionaires who control it and foist it on us at every turn. If anyone thinks these companies have humanity\u2019s best interests at heart, I can tell you first-hand that their treatment of workers (not to mention the environment<\/a>) shows the opposite.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rhetoric about the threat of AI itself is a misdirection. As author Karen Hao writes, the big AI companies are becoming the new empires<\/a>. They want us to perceive AI as an unstoppable force \u2013 one we must urgently \u201cembrace\u201d or be \u201cleft behind\u201d.<\/p>\n Elon Musk, Sam Altman (CEO of Open AI, which makes ChatGPT), and other tech leaders blithely predict<\/a> swathes of job losses while painting an idyllic picture of a future world without work<\/a>. But many people<\/a> are feeling the troubling effects<\/a> of AI on their livelihoods right now<\/a>. It\u2019s musical chairs. As jobs become fewer, we\u2019re told we must adapt well to AI to keep a seat. And what of everyone else? Some commentators see AI as, ultimately, a wage depression tool<\/a>, widening the wealth gap further.<\/p>\n Is all this really inevitable? Increasingly, people are fighting back, for example, documentingworker stories and protests<\/a>, resisting locally devastating data centres<\/a>, trying to reshape AI policy<\/a> in humane ways, and more.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0But, in the face of the enormous wealth, political power and selfishness in Silicon Valley, nothing will change unless we believe it can.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A first person account of training AI for tech giants. Summer read \u2013 originally published October 23 2025.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94943,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,4036,492,366,359,111,139,69,145,123306],"class_list":["post-230651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-comments-enabled","tag-generative-ai","tag-internet","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology","tag-tourism-fiji-summer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n