by Peter Topolewski
The swirl might not be the most fitting euphemism for it any longer, the place where since the inception of ChatGPT nearly a third of web pages are “written” by AI. But it is among the swirl of the Internet most certainly written by people that a particular phrase catches the eye—or rather the heart—and won’t let go.
The first came in a Bloomberg story about companies using digital cameras to harvest in detail the repetitive physical tasks of Indian laborers. To enable this process, men and women welding pipes and assembling shoes strap a phone to their heads to record their movements at their workstations and homes. Standard pay for this—at best inconvenience and more likely humiliating dystopian intrusion—is 300 rupees a day. It’s a significant increase that, if we assume, wishfully, they work only eight hours a day, amounts to 40 cents an hour.
The companies aggregating the video, meanwhile, fetch from $7 to $30 for each hour they sell to AI companies. Supposing those laborers work twenty days a month rather than every day, and on each of those twenty days they earn the full benefit of even one hour of their recording. At the cheapest rate they’d get a 70% raise over their current average monthly wage. That’s possibly an unfathomable amount for many of them. But imagine coming close to doubling your salary tomorrow.
For the roughly $3 a day they earn instead, the laborers don’t get much in the way of contracts, legal rights, or privacy protections. They get $3 a day and little else because they are replaceable, though are they really that much more replaceable than the guys who organize the data collection? Do the aggregators sense any better than the laborers that the beast they’re feeding is their obsolescence? The video, cleaned up and tagged, is fed into AI platforms so that one day the sneakers and pipes and t-shirts the laborers make today will be produced faster, without break and without complaint, by machines. If the Indian laborers knew this, they might also know they’re part of a promise to raise all living standards, a promise currently undone by evidence that AI-use is increasing inequality, pushing the have-nots further behind.
These laborers are part of a what increasingly looks like a thought experiment come to life. For if we have built AI agents we don’t understand and can’t control, why do we keep at it? Why do companies and investors and individuals push further into a known unknown that resembles the entangled alliances of WWI—the ones that tied the interests of nations in knots, that stole their foresight, that shrunk their wiggle room, that assured the destruction of a generation, that arranged the tinder for WWII?
What stands out in the Bloomberg report is in spite of the unfairness and exploitation built into the economics of the video data collection, in spite of Indian laborers doing the grunt work for their own extinction, the process is, the author writes, unstoppable.
It’s true in the sense that no one person, and likely not one thousand people, could bring this humiliating trade to an end. For any one company that drops out of the business, there are countless others ready to step forward. There is money to be made—which suggests AI entrepreneurs didn’t get the memo that unlimited AI abundance is about to make money worthless.
But to call the harvesting of laborer data unstoppable is to hide that each step of AI development is a choice. Someone made a choice to bestow companies with billions to spend on AI, made a choice to steal the work of artists and writers to train their technology, made a choice to justify their investments with digital trinkets like AI-generated Podcasts about your kid’s schedule, made a choice to double down for profit while losing control of a technology no one fully understands.
If anything, we should be reminding ourselves that we still have a choice about how AI progresses. Nothing is unstoppable.
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Another phrase that stood out in the maelstrom of the Internet came from a story about the father of Corey Haim, the1980s the teen heart throb who after years of addiction problems died in 2010. Haim’s life shares weird, arbitrarily applied, parallels with the story of the Indian workers. From the moment he became a teen actor until he died, Haim’s life was recorded both in movies and reality TV shows. He was taken advantage of, perhaps even sexually abused, by those in his industry. When he was gone, he was promptly forgotten by Hollywood, earning no mention during the In Memoriam montage at the 2011 Oscars.
Corey’s father Bernie was in the news because this summer he put a plaque on a park bench in a suburb of Montreal. The plaque honors Corey and the time Bernie had with him. It is a tribute. It was not a mark of wishful thinking that one day Bernie would again see his son, or that he could feel Corey’s presence in the park. Bernie did it for himself. “I’m just happy I did that. I’m happy for me I did that,” Bernie said about the plaque. “I just wanted to do something that just makes me happy, that’s all.”
“He’s not here anymore,” Bernie said about Corey. “Believe me. Once they go, they go.”
Like the unstoppable comment in the Bloomberg story, Bernie’s words—once they go, they go—indicate a choice. It is a choice about how to comport yourself to a tough reality.
What’s strikingly different is that Bernie seems to have spoken these words with no agenda. Bernie’s not selling a philosophy or an excuse, something we tend to do when try to take or exploit or convince. At a time when religion is again being forced into schools and the hucksters of war and politics and technology are selling their wares with hidden costs, Bernie’s choice and his bluntness are oddly comforting.