Boring, high-paying data labeling work, anyone?
A short rant on a “10 high-paying remote jobs that don’t need college degrees” video that promoted data labeling work as both high-paying and boring
Last week, my husband spotted a YouTube video with a clickbait title something like “10 high-paying remote jobs that don’t need college degrees”, and thousands of views. He wanted to watch it, so we did. The first job profiled in the video? Data labeler!
This video pundit claimed that data labeling work for AI pays $20-40/hour (ha!) and only mentioned among the downsides that the work might be “kind of boring”.
Nothing about having to watch horrific content for hours on end and cope with emotional stress or even PTSD.
Nothing about how companies offshore this work, pay pennies per piece labeled (not per hour), and bilk people out of pay.
To learn more about data labeling work, and why it’s currently an ethical concern for how many AI companies do business, see AI Ethics: Beyond Not Stealing Data and Everyday Ethical AI: A Guide For Families & Small Businesses.
In the current terrible job market, people seeing videos like this might be tempted to try for these kinds of jobs. They’re likely in for a huge disappointment. I don’t yet know of any ethical data work company that pays fairly and treats their data workers respectfully. If you do, please share!
Oh that's horrible Karen! Thanks for sharing this.
I have seen several data-labelling jobs promoted on LinkedIn. Some of these are even targeted for lawyers and "linguistic experts". Feels slightly dystopian. Imagine spending so many years on an degree only to end up training an AI model how to do your work for you