Alexej Savreux, a 34-year-old from Kansas City, has had various jobs in the past, including fast-food sandwich maker, custodian, and technical sound work for live theater. Today, he is an artificial intelligence (AI) trainer.
Savreux and other contractors are part of an unnoticed workforce responsible for teaching AI systems like ChatGPT to analyze data and generate text and images. Earning $15 an hour or more without benefits, these individuals label photos and predict text output to improve AI accuracy.
Although their work has gone largely unrecognized, AI trainers like Savreux play a crucial role in the development of language systems. He has worked with tech startups like OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that released ChatGPT in November, sparking excitement around generative AI.
The labor of contract workers is essential yet often overlooked in the AI field. Sonam Jindal, the program lead for AI, labor, and the economy at the Partnership on AI, a nonprofit promoting AI research and education, points out that the AI industry relies heavily on a large human workforce.
The tech sector has long depended on lower-skilled, lower-paid workers, from punch-card operators in the 1950s to Google contractors who faced second-class treatment. The rise of online gig work through platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk has further expanded this trend.
AI contract work is characterized by its unsteady, on-demand nature. Contractors typically work under written agreements with a company or third-party vendor specializing in temp work or outsourcing. Benefits such as health insurance are rare, keeping costs low for tech companies, while the work remains anonymous and credit goes to startup executives and researchers.
The Partnership on AI predicted a spike in demand for “data enrichment work” in a 2021 report, urging the industry to commit to fair compensation and improved practices. Last year, the organization published voluntary guidelines for companies, but DeepMind, a Google AI subsidiary, is the only firm to publicly commit to them.
AI contract work is seeing increased demand, and some workers are pushing for more. In Nairobi, Kenya, over 150 people who worked on AI for Facebook, TikTok, and ChatGPT voted to form a union, citing low pay and the mental toll of the work.
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Savreux, who works from home, found AI contracting through an online job posting. He credits the work, along with a previous job at sandwich chain Jimmy John’s, with helping him escape homelessness. AI gig work, he says, is the necessary entry-level area of machine learning.
While there is no definitive count of contractors working for AI companies, it is an increasingly common job worldwide. OpenAI, for example, has hired around 1,000 remote contractors in Eastern Europe and Latin America to label data or train company software on computer engineering tasks.
The process of creating data to train AI models isn’t always simple and can attract aspiring AI entrepreneurs. Jatin Kumar, a 22-year-old in Austin, Texas, has been doing AI work on contract for a year since graduating college with a computer science degree. He sees this work as an opportunity to understand the future direction of generative AI technology.
Think that training AI could be great gig for you? Well, as it turns out, You’re a Google Employee, You Just Don’t Realize
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