"On the veranda of her family's home, with her laptop balanced on a mud slab built into the wall, Monsumi Murmu works from one of the few places where the mobile signal holds. The familiar sounds of domestic life come from inside the house: clinking utensils, footsteps, voices. On her screen a very different scene plays: a woman is pinned down by a group of men, the camera shakes, there is shouting and the sound of breathing."
"On an average day, she views up to 800 videos and images, making judgments that train algorithms to recognise violence, abuse and harm. This work sits at the core of machine learning's recent breakthroughs, which rest on the fact that AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. In India, this labour is increasingly performed by women, who are part of an workforce often described as ghost workers."
"The first few months, I couldn't sleep, she says. I would close my eyes and still see the screen loading. Images followed her into her dreams: of fatal accidents, of losing family members, of sexual violence she could not stop or escape. On those nights, she says, her mother would wake and sit with her. In terms of risk, content moderation belongs in the category of dangerous work, comparable to any lethal industry Milagros Miceli, sociologist"
Monsumi Murmu works from her village veranda where mobile signal allows, balancing a laptop on a mud slab. She classifies images, videos and text flagged by automated systems as possible platform-rule violations. On an average day she views up to 800 items, making judgments that train algorithms to recognise violence, abuse and harm. This moderation work underpins recent machine learning breakthroughs because AI depends on training data quality. In India this labour is increasingly performed by women who are often described as ghost workers. Repeated exposure caused insomnia, intrusive dreams and eventual emotional numbing comparable to harms in lethal industries.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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