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The human labor powering AI engines

A photo taken in Manta, near Turin, shows a computer screen with the home page of the artificial intelligence OpenAI web site, displaying its chatGPT robot.
A photo taken in Manta, near Turin, shows a computer screen with the home page of the artificial intelligence OpenAI web site, displaying its chatGPT robot.

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Listen 29:52

You’ve seen the headlines. Artificial Intelligence is taking over jobs. But as anxieties over automation mount, AI is already responsible for the employment of millions of workers globally.

From chatbots to text-to-image generators, AI relies on human workers labeling and annotating the millions of images and words it references. But the work of feeding information to AI can be tedious, with unreliable pay and few opportunities for growth.

So, what do we know about this workforce? And as Congress moves to regulate AI, how are the industry’s gig workers being considered?

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