It Turns Out That Google's AI Is Being Trained by an Army of Poorly Treated Human Grunts

Google is depending on thousands of contractors to train the AI behind its flagship chatbot Gemini.

As The Guardian reports, many of these "AI raters," tasked with instructing the model and correcting its many mistakes, are facing poor working conditions and are often exposed to extremely disturbing content.

It's yet again a worrying reminder that despite tech companies attempting to paint their AI models as miraculous, autonomous fountains of knowledge and cognition that could eventually replace human workers, the current reality is the exact opposite: AI relies on the labor of huge numbers of hidden humans to give it the illusion of intelligence.

And it's not just the current crop of large language models — AI raters across the globe are being tasked to label data for AI-based, self-driving car software, and other related applications.

"AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor," Distributed AI Research Institute's Adio Dinika told the Guardian. "These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable."

In the realm of large language models like Google's Gemini, raters are being tasked with moderating the output of AI, not only ensuring the accuracy of its responses, but also that it doesn't expose users to inappropriate content.

Rachel Sawyer, one such worker who was contracted as a "generalist rater" for Google last year, told the Guardian that she was "shocked" after being told to work with "distressing content."

"Not only because I was given no warning and never asked to sign any consent forms during onboarding," she added, "but because neither the job title or description ever mentioned content moderation."

According to the newspaper, raters with no special expertise are being asked to verify the accuracy across highly complex domains such as architecture, astrophysics, and even medical guidance.

One rater told the newspaper that she was pressured to work faster, while being tasked with training the AI on sensitive medical topics like chemotherapy treatments for bladder cancer.

"I pictured a person sitting in their car finding out that they have bladder cancer and googling what I’m editing," she said.

In a statement to the Guardian, Google refuted the idea that raters are responsible for making AI models sound smart. A spokesperson argued that "quality raters" were "employed to provide external feedback on our products," which "help us measure how well our systems are working, but do not directly impact our algorithms or models."

Japanese contractor GlobalLogic contracted thousands of raters in the US to train Google's AI. Their hourly wages of $16 to $21 an hour — dwarfed by the astronomical salaries of AI researchers — tend to still be far higher than their counterparts in Africa and South Africa, per the Guardian's sources. But it's not an easy job, and one that that can leave lasting scars.

"They are people with expertise who are doing a lot of great writing work, who are being paid below what they’re worth to make an AI model that, in my opinion, the world doesn’t need," one rater told the newspaper.

Many raters are also being pressured to work on tight deadlines and cope with rapidly changing guidelines.

"We had no idea where it was going, how it was being used or to what end," a different GlobalLogic-contracted rater told the Guardian.

It's a sobering glimpse behind the scenes, highlighting how much human work goes into tech that's being sold as a revolutionary way to circumvent human labor. Yet despite the raters' best efforts, frontier AI models including Google's Gemini continue to frequently hallucinate, bungling answers to the simplest of prompts.

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