AI’s Hidden Workers Are Stuck in Dead-End Jobs

(Bloomberg Opinion) — You may have heard that revolutionary AI sits on old-world foundations. The supply chain churning out generative AI tools like ChatGPT has highly paid executives and researchers at the top, and at the bottom, working stiffs who toil at screens training algorithms. Between 150 million and 430 million people do such work, according to a recent World Bank estimate: They annotate images, text and audio; create bounding boxes around objects in images and, more recently, write haikus, essays and fictional stories to train the sophisticated tools that could eventually replace people like me.