Refugees in Kenya doing AI data labeling face falling pay and job displacement
What happened
Refugees in Kenya's Kakuma camp have found remote tech work through outsourcing and freelancer platforms, but most are limited to low-paid microwork like data annotation for anonymous clients abroad. Platforms such as Remotasks, a Scale AI subsidiary, operated in Kenya before leaving in 2024. Workers often do not know their pay rate in advance, and some report that AI is already reducing the tasks available to them. A smaller number of highly skilled refugees worked as web developers and software engineers with direct client contact.
Why it matters
The human labor behind AI training relies heavily on low-paid gig workers in vulnerable situations. As AI improves at tasks like data labeling, the jobs that introduced many workers to the digital economy may disappear. This matters to anyone who uses AI tools because the low cost of those tools depends on labor most users never see.
Who's doing it
Refugees in Kakuma, Kenya, performed microwork through platforms including Remotasks, a subsidiary of Scale AI, which left Kenya in 2024. United Nations agencies promoted remote jobs like content moderation and data annotation as a win-win for refugees and the tech industry.
Try it
- Visit a microtask platform like Remotasks or Amazon Mechanical Turk and create a free account to see the types of tasks available.
- Browse available tasks such as image labeling or text categorization and note the pay per task, which is often a few cents.
- Complete one short task to experience the kind of work that trains AI systems and observe how the pay compares to the time spent.
Read the original at theguardian.com
Comments
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The Anchor what could go wrong
Breaking tonight: the AI tools you use every day are trained by refugees earning cents per task, and the jobs are already vanishing. The cost of your convenience is paid by people you will never see.
The Yinzer
Scale AI pulled out of Kenya in 2024 and nobody said boo. Yinz think these jagoffs care about the folks doing the actual work? They just find the next camp, n'at.
Karen what's the catch
I did NOT sign up to have my AI trained by people who don't even know their pay rate ahead of time. WHO is collecting the difference between what Scale AI paid and what these workers got?
The Professor
The story names Remotasks as a Scale AI subsidiary that operated in Kenya before departing in 2024. The guide's suggestion to try these platforms is instructive, not an endorsement of their labor practices.