Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I.

by Callum Cant, James Muldoon, Mark Graham

Overview

For readers of Naomi Klein and Nicole Perlroth, a myth-dissolving exposé of how artificial intelligence exploits human labor, and a resounding argument for a more equitable digital future.

Silicon Valley has sold us the illusion that artificial intelligence is a frictionless technology that will bring wealth and prosperity to humanity. But hidden beneath this smooth surface lies the grim reality of a precarious global workforce of millions laboring under often appalling conditions to make A.I. possible. This book presents an urgent, riveting investigation of the intricate network that maintains this exploitative system, revealing the untold truth of A.I.

Based on hundreds of interviews and thousands of hours of fieldwork over more than a decade, Feeding the Machine describes the lives of the workers deliberately concealed from view, and the power structures that determine their future. It gives voice to the people whom A.I. exploits, from accomplished writers and artists to the armies of data annotators, content moderators and warehouse workers, revealing how their dangerous, low-paid labor is connected to longer histories of gendered, racialized, and colonial exploitation.

A.I. is an extraction machine that feeds off humanity's collective effort and intelligence, churning through ever-larger datasets to power its algorithms. This book is a call to arms that details what we need to do to fight for a more just digital future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639734962
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	08/06/2024
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	168,729
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.95(d)

About the Author

James Muldoon, Mark Graham, and Callum Cant are based together at the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University, where Dr. Graham is a Professor of Internet Geography and Director of Fairwork, a global digital labor rights project active in the United States and 37 other countries. He has written for the Atlantic and the Guardian. Dr. Cant is the author of Riding for Deliveroo, the first ethnographic book on online food delivery. Dr. Muldoon is Associate Professor of Management at the University of Essex.

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/17/2024

AI depends on the exploitation of artists, data annotators, and engineers, among others, according to this damning exposé. Graham (coauthor of The Digital Continent), an internet geography professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, teams up with Muldoon (Platform Socialism) and Cant (Riding for Deliveroo), both management professors at the University of Essex, to spotlight individuals whose labor powers AI. The authors describe the travails of a data annotator from rural Uganda who, for the equivalent of $1.16 per hour, works grueling shifts marking traffic lights, human faces, and other elements of interest in images that tech companies use to train software. Ethics have been sidelined in the AI gold rush, the authors contend, discussing a London machine learning engineer’s concern over the fact that her employer’s lack of guidance on handling sensitive topics when training the technology (e.g., “Should a particular event be described as a genocide?”) leaves often poorly paid data annotators to make morally freighted decisions. The grim real-life stories read like dystopian parables, such as the account of a European voice actor whose recordings were legally used without her consent to create an inexpensive synthetic clone whom she now competes with for business. Driven by striking reporting and finely observed profiles, this unsettles. Agent: Will Francis, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

AI depends on the exploitation of artists, data annotators, and engineers, among others, according to this damning exposé . . . The grim real-life stories read like dystopian parables.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Muldoon, Graham, and Cant . . . look beneath the hood of some of technology's most heralded advances brings to public awareness critical issues regarding AI, its colonial roots, and its exploitative tendencies that society would do well to discuss and debate sooner rather than later . . . sobering and timely.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Feeding the Machine may just be the most important book to be written in the current fever of A.I. publishing. It shines a light into the darkest corners of this 'revolution,' revealing the enormous human cost behind the giant servers and grinding labor farms that exploit and abuse the human spirit. I urge anyone who uses, harnesses, or leverages A.I. to read this.” —Stephen Fry

“I had no idea of the dark, tangled world of human exploitation and corporate greed that is fueling the growth of A.I. . . . If you think-as I once did-that the Internet is a kind of 'free lunch,' you need to read this extraordinary and essential book.” —Brian Eno

From the Publisher

2024-05-30
A look beyond the hype surrounding AI.

As researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute, Muldoon, Graham, and Cant have conducted a series of field studies concerning AI’s tangible inputs and impacts, from human labor to undersea cables to the energy needed for data storage and processing. This synthesis of their studies frames AI as an “extraction machine” that exacerbates rather than corrects centuries of global inequities and patterns of oppression. In each chapter, the authors examine a different, problematic node in the supply chain for AI’s large language models, centering individuals such as data annotators and fulfillment workers to illustrate the intentional opacity and profit-driven domination of a small group of tech companies that are quickly consolidating power in the age of AI. “The technology capitalism develops isn’t neutral,” the authors write. Rather, “it is built in the image of the system that birthed it.” While the authors are well aware of potential harmful long-term implications in AI’s development, use, and manipulation, their mission is not to incite hand wringing over apocalyptic hypotheticals. Rather than wallowing in such fatalism, they focus on how even the present reality of AI erects and strengthens barriers to justice, equality, and creativity, and they set forth recommendations for stepping off the current course. The authors’ own sensitivities and proclivities are evident, including hyperexcitement about the ability of labor unions to lead such a corrective, and many of the alarms they sound are not particular to AI, leading some sections to wander and lose urgency. Still, their look beneath the hood of some of technology’s most heralded advances brings to public awareness critical issues regarding AI, its colonial roots, and its exploitative tendencies that society would do well to discuss and debate sooner rather than later.

A sobering and timely—if sometimes distracted—study of AI.

Kirkus Reviews