Raw LLM Responses

A *Rest of World* investigation found that some AI industry partners recruit student interns for subminimum wages and under poor conditions, with vocational schools sometimes taking a cut from students’ earnings.^1 >When Lucy enrolled in the school’s computer science program, she thought she would learn to code and become a programmer. But in reality, her work was no different from an assembly line job. >“It was very boring. We didn’t learn anything,” Lucy told *Rest of World*, speaking under a pseudonym to avoid being identified. >But the school demanded that the whole class complete the internship, or else they would not be allowed to graduate. >Lucy is part of China’s new digital underclass — one of hundreds of thousands of data annotators fuelling the country’s booming artificial intelligence industry. >Data annotators label vast quantities of raw data — tagging images of cars, screening videos for violent content, and filtering audio for keywords — to train machine learning models. >Their labor, often underpaid and overlooked, is crucial to the development of new AI applications — from intelligent chatbots to autonomous vehicles. ^1 https://restofworld.org/2023/china-ai-student-labor/