Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

A quick follow-up: digging into the history of CrowdFlower a bit, this exploitative data labelling company claimed Mozilla as one of its customers: https://web.archive.org/web/20170515113522/https://www.crowdflower.com/success-stories/

The same Mozilla that is now loudly talking about "ethical AI", and seems to have never spoken about their past dealings with this company. It's also not clear whether they still do business with them (it's part of Appen now).

Now it's not *certain* that this claim is true - tech companies, especially of the techbro kind, are certainly not beyond embellishing their customer lists to look more respectable. But this certainly raises some questions - especially since CrowdFlower legitimately has at least some large companies as its customer.

So after watching the Ghost Worker documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPSZFUiElls) and finding that Lukas Biewald (featured in the documentary) seems to have written his own puffy Wikipedia article, I dug into the guy a bit more, and I ran across a thing he'd made in the past - the GiveWork app.

To quote from a picture (attached) explaining how that app worked: "Ever wonder if you could use a few spare minutes to do good for the world? [...] When you complete a task on your iPhone or iPod Touch, the same task is assigned to a marginalized person in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, or Haiti. When your answers match and the task is verified, this person gets paid for the work you did together."

This app seems to have been widely covered at the time as an altruistic endeavour, a progressive use of tech, a way to "support refugees". It was developed and run by CrowdFlower, Biewald's for-profit company, and a 'non-profit' called Samasource.

Now you might have already noticed that that's kind of a weird model to be using to 'support refugees'. Why all the extra steps? (If you're familiar with the subject matter, you probably already know the answer by this point.)

Well, guess what Lukas Biewald, now the founder of Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower), was featured in the documentary for?

Quoting from an old conference recording shown in the documentary, Biewald speaking: "Before the internet, it would be really difficult to find someone, sit them down for 10 minutes and get them to work for you, and then fire them after those 10 minutes. But, with technology, you can actually find them, pay them a tiny amount of money, uhm, and then get rid of them when you don't need them anymore."

This makes it transparently obvious what the actual goal was of GiveWork: it was never meant to support refugees, it was meant to *exploit* them as a cheap source of labour. Each bit of data had to be processed by two independent people to spot wrong/fake data, and this was an easy way to both cut down on labour costs *and* frame it as a charitable act instead of the labour exploitation that it actually is.

But the reporting about GiveWork didn't mention that bit. Instead, it uncritically copied the framing of charitable, progressive tech.

Unsurprisingly, Biewald was featured in the Ghost Workers documentary because people doing work for his company where paid far below minimum wage, with Biewald trying to dodge any critical questions about that, explicitly only wanting to talk about AI.

Oh, and that non-profit Samasource?

"Samasource Impact Sourcing, Inc., formerly known as Samasource and Sama, is a training-data company, focusing on annotating data for artificial intelligence algorithms. [...] First founded as a non-profit in 2008, Sama adopted a hybrid business model in 2019, becoming a for-profit business with the previous non-profit organization becoming a shareholder."

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And this is exactly the problem with 'liberal' approaches to progressive politics, that are not actually led by marginalized folks but by privileged folks who are out to 'save' them through a business, through tech, etc. (or at least claim so) - almost without exception, it turns into some exploitative bullshit, often deliberately so.

And since people rarely pay attention to what some organization does after the initial wave of "look what amazing progress they are making", there are essentially zero consequences or accountability. I bet that you didn't know about how GiveWork turned out, for example.

Question for #Wikipedia nerds: I've found an article on Wikipedia about a techbro that very much reads like it's written by the dude himself to advertise him personally - I've already removed the in-body external link to his company, but the rest of the article still reads like a puff piece and conveniently omits any negative press coverage.

Where/how do I report this as something that needs to be looked at? I do not currently have the spoons to fix it myself.

Music tip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uce6VsWy4dw