One-third of payments to contractors training AI systems used by companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have not been paid on time after the Australian company Appen moved to a new worker management platform.
Appen employs 1 million contractors who speak more than 500 languages and are based in 200 countries. They work to label photographs, text, audio and other data to improve AI systems used by the large tech companies and have been referred to as “ghost workers” – the unseen human labour involved in training systems people use every day.
