Internet cafes in the Philippines are now frequented by workers who sort and label data for artificial intelligence models.
More than 2 million people in the Philippines perform this type of “crowdwork,” according to informal government estimates, as part of AI’s vast underbelly. While AI is often thought of as human-free machine learning, the technology actually relies on the labor-intensive efforts of a workforce spread across much of the Global South and often subject to exploitation.
Scale AI has paid workers at extremely low rates, routinely delayed or withheld payments and provided few channels for workers to seek recourse, according to interviews with workers, internal company messages and payment records, and financial statements. Rights groups and labor researchers say Scale AI is among a number of American AI companies that have not abided by basic labor standards for their workers abroad.
But on an internal messaging platform for Remotasks, which The Washington Post accessed in July, notices of late or missing payments from supervisors were commonplace. On some projects, there were multiple notices in a single month. Sometimes, supervisors told workers payments were withheld because work was inaccurate or late. Other times, supervisors gave no explanation. Attempts to track down lost payments often went nowhere, workers said - or worse, led to their accounts being deactivated.
Jackie, 26, said he worked three days on a project that he thought would earn him $50, and he got $12. “The budget for all this, I know it’s big,” Paul said, staring into his hands at a coffee shop in Cagayan de Oro. “None of that is trickling down to us.”
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