Dinesh Raj, who lives in Salem, Tamil Nadu, maintains his account on microwork website Amazon Mechanical Turk, even though the competition for data annotation tasks on the crowdsourced platform is high, and the pay low.
The 30-year-old, who has an engineering degree, has struggled to find a decent-paying job, and relies on the platform for most of his income, which can vary from day to day.
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“I work at night, when there are more jobs than US customers,” said Mr. Raj, who has worked on Amazon MTurk for about four years.
“Only two out of 10 jobs I do can get approved, so I have to do more jobs to earn $10-$30 a day. But it’s still better than nothing,” said Mr. Raj, who Sometimes they rent out their IDs to members. A Facebook group of Indian workers on Amazon MTurk.
The explosive growth in artificial intelligence (AI) is fueling the need for large training datasets, generated by millions of workers using text, images, videos for everything from voice recognition assistants to facial recognition to 3D image recognition for autonomous vehicles. and audio labels.
According to the International Labor Organization, India makes up about a third of the global online freelance workers, with developing countries accounting for about two-thirds of the total remote workforce.
Tech experts say fewer labor regulations and lower wages are the norm, with workers handling even the most difficult and taxing jobs with few legal protections.
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Urvashi Aneja, director of an Indian digital futures lab, said, “There is some rhetoric about data annotation creating new opportunities for people who need flexibility, or need to work from home. But Employees are at the bottom of the AI value chain.” Research Collective.
“A lot of this work is very uncertain… with ChatGPT and other generative AI, it is also emotionally taxing. The issue of content moderation is becoming more complex, and we are seeing more low-wage workers gonna get caught up in it,” he said.
outsourcing
San Francisco-based launch ChatGPT Chatbot by OpenAI Launched to the public in November a global frenzy, with over 1 million users downloading it in the first week.
Since then, AI-based tools have been incorporated into education, marketing, customer service queries, and online search and content creation.
The excitement was met with the revelation that OpenAI had outsourced data annotation to workers in Kenya who were paid less than $2 an hour to label content that included hate speech and images of violence and sexual abuse, according to a Time magazine check.
But they are not alone.
Chicago-based Hugo regularly hires overseas, usually university-educated and native speakers of English, French or Portuguese, according to its website.
One such worker – known as Rater – in Jibou, Nigeria, said that although the work was not difficult, “the number of tasks can sometimes be unimaginably insane, so you may find yourself overwhelmed on some days.” Will be found working beyond the hours of contractual work.”
“Overtime is not paid for except when explicitly requested,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.
Every minute of an eight-hour work day is tracked “down to the second,” Rater said, and he can be punished if he doesn’t do so by constantly interacting with the screen with his mouse. If he doesn’t track his time, he’ll have to redo his hours, and lose pay for any time that shows him unavailable, they said.
“It’s exhausting. You get very little time for anything else,” he said. Even when he completes a task, he has to keep clicking on the page until his eight hours are up.
Rater’s pay slip shows she was paid 127,500 naira ($274) for a month’s work in January, or about $1.50 an hour, nearly four times the national minimum wage of 30,000 naira a month.
A Hugo spokesperson said that the company’s teams “work a maximum of eight hour workdays … When a customer requests overtime, we give it to our team members who can volunteer, Fully compensated at the pre-agreed premium.”
“We count young men, women, stay-at-home moms and recent grads among our team, all of whom need the flexibility to care for and sustain careers,” he said in an emailed statement.
In the Philippines — long an outsourcing destination for its young, English-speaking population — freelance data annotation on platforms such as Upwork has become “highly competitive,” said John Anthony Abayari, in Bulacan province in the central Luzon region.
Abayari, 25, has worked as a freelance data annotator for local and foreign firms since 2019 when she “really needed a job”, starting at a monthly salary of 12,000 pesos ($218).
Last year, he started working as a freelance video annotator and now earns around 40,000 pesos a month.
The job “can be challenging because it is time-consuming and exhausting,” he said. “For the money, it’s still worth it. But if I get an opportunity for another job, I’ll take it.”
women workers
According to IT industry body NASSCOM, India is set to be one of the world’s largest markets for data annotation labor with 1 million full-time and part-time workers by 2030.
Currently, an estimated 50,000 data annotators are freelancers on platforms such as Amazon MTurk and Clickworker, while around 20,000 work full-time in third-party firms, many of which are located in small towns and villages.
These companies offer employees some training, fixed hours and a monthly salary of around $200-$300, said Muzammil Hussain, founder of Tika Data, which is particularly attractive to women.
“The work itself is simple, so customers don’t pay a lot. This got me thinking: how can I reduce costs? By setting up in smaller towns and villages where costs are lower,” he said.
“The money is always less because it is a low-skill job. But Rs 15,000-25,000 is a very good salary in a village where there are few other opportunities for women, so they are happy,” she said.
Women freelancers in India, however, can struggle to get even on microwork platforms, often paying hefty sums in the gray market for an account, and settling for the lowest paying and most difficult tasks, as As stated in a 2021 report by the research group IT. Change, which studied Amazon MTurk.
Less than a quarter of the Indian employees working on the platform are women. Amazon MTurk did not respond to a request for comment.
Saryu Natarajan said, “The fact that this work is almost entirely digital and can be distributed really enables women to participate. It is seen as respectable work that women can do in their own homes.” without leaving, and it is a ‘clean and safe’ job.” Founder of Apti Institute, a digital think tank.
“However, women face specific barriers: low levels of access to digital technologies – phones and laptops – and difficulties in accessing credit financing for purchasing equipment,” she said.
Anu K. The path to a job in Data Annotation was easy.
Living in Mannarkkad, Kerala, she had few job options despite having a master’s degree, and was a stay-at-home mom. So when she heard about Infofolks, a data annotation firm near her home that was hiring women, she was excited.
Ms. Anu was hired, and after two months of training, she began working full-time, earning approximately $220 per month.
“I find the work interesting, and my family is very happy because I work 9-5, and there are no night shifts,” she said. “Mannarkkad is a small town, so there are not many options for women. It was my dream to be in the IT sector, and this is the best option.”