Data and Content Moderation Labor

"Two key ethical concerns in the use of crowdwork for generative AI systems are: crowdworkers are frequently subject to working conditions that are taxing and debilitative to both physical and mental health, and there is a widespread deficit in documenting the role crowdworkers play in AI development. This contributes to a lack of transparency and explainability in resulting model outputs. Manual review is necessary to limit the harmful outputs of AI systems, including generative AI systems. A common harmful practice is to intentionally employ crowdworkers with few labor protections, often taking advantage of highly vulnerable workers, such as refugees [119, p. 18], incarcerated people [54], or individuals experiencing immense economic hardship [98, 181]. This precarity allows a myriad of harmful practices, such as companies underpaying or even refusing to pay workers for completed work (see Gray and Suri [93, p. 90] and Berg et al. [29, p. 74]), with no avenues for worker recourse. Finally, critical aspects of crowdwork are often left poorly documented, or entirely undocumented [88]."