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.
Appen moved to a new contributor platform called CrowdGen in September, which the company said would “enhance our ability to deliver high-quality data at scale”.
But the company admitted nearly one-third of the company’s payments for projects worked on by contractors were not paid on time as a result of an issue with payment processing integration.
“We have been working diligently to address the issue. Over two-thirds of payments were made on time, and we continued to make daily payments since then,” a spokesperson said.
“We are continuing to process payments daily and are on track to close out the remainder this week, which is well within our contractual obligations to our crowd workforce.”
The spokesperson said payments are being processed as batches by project and, if a contributor is involved in multiple projects, their payment may be spread across multiple days.
“This is a suboptimal experience for our crowd, and we have committed to on-time payment for work completed in October.”
The spokesperson would not confirm the number of contractors affected. However, the spokesperson said that not all of the 1 million contractors may have been active at the time the issue occurred.
The company’s chief executive, Ryan Kolln, apologised to contractors in a message on the company’s website, stating: “We are truly sorry for the stress and frustration that this has caused.
“We are working diligently to fix the issue with the payment implementation, and I want to provide some additional context on how this occurred and what we are doing to fix the issue.”
Frustrated workers have complained on Reddit about their treatment.
“We are told to keep working, keep delivering, with no concrete answers on when we’ll get paid in full,” one worker posted.
“I’m in such a state of panic right now. I keep shifting between rage and terror. Some people can’t wait until next month to get paid,” another stated.
In October, Appen announced to the Australian stock exchange it had raised $50m in equity. In January, Google ended its contract with the company, which was worth A$125m in 2023.
• This article was amended on 25 October 2024 to clarify that it was nearly one-third of the company’s payments for projects worked on by contractors that were not paid on time, rather than nearly one-third of contractors not paid on time as an earlier version said. Contractors can receive multiple payments from different projects.
