How AI takes a toll on the freelancers who train, test, and refine it

Insider

Freelancers around the world who train, test, and refine AI responses are the hidden force behind smarter chatbots. Their work can be flexible and rewarding, but often comes with low pay, exhausting tasks, and growing uncertainty as the industry shifts toward specialized, higher-paid roles.

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00:00When chatbots become smarter, funnier and more human-like, chances are they're being trained

00:06by human freelancers. There are at least hundreds of thousands of them around the world,

00:11often working from home, cafes, libraries and shared offices. Their job is to rate the AI's

00:17responses, write new ones and flag harmful content. What they do shapes the AI you talk to,

00:23like helping Grok tell better jokes or improving ChatGPT's math solving skills.

00:28Over the last few months, Business Insider has spoken to more than 60 AI contractors located

00:34all around the world, from Kenya to New York to Istanbul. They told us the side hustle can be

00:39flexible, rewarding and enjoyable, but also monotonous, unpredictable and mentally exhausting.

00:45Most of the people we spoke to work for Outlier, a data annotation platform run by ScaleAI,

00:50which received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in June. The price tag shows just how

00:55lucrative the AI training industry has become. Some contractors make thousands of dollars a month,

01:00but others, particularly those in Africa and Asia, sometimes get paid just a couple of dollars an hour.

01:06Some of the tasks can take a psychological toll on freelancers, like deliberately trying to provoke

01:11the chatbots into producing violent, racist or sexually abusive responses, all in an effort to make

01:17the system safer for the hundreds of millions of people using them worldwide. While many freelancers

01:22enjoy the flexibility, it's a side hustle that comes with a lot of uncertainty. After Meta's

01:27investment in ScaleAI, many projects on Outlier were put on pause. Many contractors told us that

01:32they went weeks without any work. And the work itself is changing fast. As AI gets better at reasoning,

01:38companies are moving away from large pools of generalists, and towards smaller teams of highly

01:43paid specialists. Some platforms are paying over a hundred dollars an hour for doctors and lawyers

01:49to review prompts. There are other challenges too. Many annotators said the work feels like

01:54helping to build systems that may one day replace them. It's left many wondering when the training might

02:00be done. And when it is, what happens to the people who helped build the AI in the first place?

02:05To read the full story, head to businessinsider.com

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