Artificial Intelligence:
Millions of People Sacrificed

Apr 14, 2025

The following is translated from the February 21, 2025, issue #2951 of Lutte Ouvrière (Workers Struggle), the paper of the Trotskyist group of that name active in France.

The meteoric rise of artificial intelligence could not happen without the super-exploitation of a large number of new proletarians working alone who allow these systems to function.

A French TV report “The Sacrifices of AI” disclosed confidential information about the giant companies involved in this sector. Data workers existed before there was any talk about artificial intelligence, but there are now between 150 and 430 million of them, according to the World Bank. Google announced it will need one billion such workers in the years to come, spread all over the world but mostly in poor countries. This will make handling data the world’s leading sector of employment.

These workers are subjected to super-exploitation and a frantic pace of up to ten hours of repetitive motions per day. The workers examine thousands of files to be processed by super-computers. It’s like they’re in a dictatorship because they are bound to secrecy under penalty of prosecution, including prison, if they reveal what they are doing to anyone, even family members, let alone journalists or public servants. They are forbidden from joining unions. Their pay is hardly 200 dollars per month for work that can take up to 60 hours per week.

The few testimonies collected reveal how quickly the mental health of these workers degenerates, for example in Kenya. This is how pro-employer site Innovation.com dealt with this problem, with all the frankness and contempt to be expected: “In developing countries, AI offers new economic opportunities. Companies can outsource AI tasks, such as data or image annotation, to workers around the world. This provides income opportunities for people with Internet access, even in remote areas…. This is a bias of privileged countries, which see AI annotation as microtasking. But it is a necessary job for the AI revolution which few individuals in the world are willing to do.” For good reason!

As for “income opportunities,” they are mainly for the IT bosses, who rack up billions in profits. But the labor of all these people is wasted on a vast scale. In countries imperialism condemns to underdevelopment, how much infrastructure and equipment could be built using the valuable work of these hundreds of millions of workers? When technology advances farther, what will happen to these modern galley slaves? Their reward will be more poverty.

One of the documentary’s authors aptly summed up the problem: “We only show what AI can do, but we should have started by asking the question: how is AI made?” And AI is indeed made by human exploitation.

The lives of distress that support information technology and AI are not footnotes to the human story. But, until now, only a few members of the United Nations-affiliated International Labor Organization (ILO) have denounced the treatment of these hundreds of millions of workers, as have some associations, researchers, journalists, and the Human Rights League. They give humanitarian reasons. But the international working class, and especially workers in the rich countries, must consider these workers as sisters and brothers in exploitation and class struggle. In the capitalist world, barbarism always accompanies what would be undeniable progress in a collective society.