Human Data Sensors - The Abyss is Looking Back
It's an increasingly less heard argument (in my experience at least) that AI companies would eventually run out of training data and, with the ever degrading quality of synthetic data, some kind of brick wall of development would be hit. It was never a good argument, relying as it did on domain specific imaginations (well they will run out of online art to steal) and naivety (they can only scrape so much online). Which is probably why it's heard less and less now as the voracious hunger for data of AI companies begins to evolve and show just how abyss like its gut is.
For a while now people have known about the monitoring of workers for AI training purposes, from Amazon tracking workers to the point of constant, harassing surveillance to factory workers being recorded to build their dead labour into the speculative form of robots. Resistance to that, especially of the everyday sort, can be a hard one to gauge. Whether any given worker or community has thought to engage in go slows, or forms of malicious compliance that may lessen the value of that data being taken from them I don't know, nor should anyone really given how covert those tactics would need to be.
As the push for real world data gathers pace though, with new companies emerging to infiltrate our daily lived experience, such as this one that's offering free cleaning services to record and extract data from private spaces, there's definitely a looming moment for real push back.
AI companies are always at their most vulnerable when they're forced to be open about what they do. From the exploitation of data workers to the the surveillance of children the processes that make this particular sausage are routinely grotesque and seldom measure up to either the utopian promises they offer or the value of the platforms they create.
Previously, I suspect, a lot of the most offensive aspects of AI motivated surveillance have been at least slightly buried beneath a veneer of technological 'neutrality'. Surveillance cameras have been normalised to the point of indifference, Google cars roll the streets all the time mapping spaces, data is scraped constantly beneath the consumer focused veneer of most of the internet. None of which necessarily obscures the process to anyone who cares to look, but it's enough of a cover for those who never think to pay attention to not be overly bothered. Shifting that into the realm of constant, human driven surveillance of space, movement and activity however is a bit more mask off.
As we've seen with the (unfortunately) increasingly popular Meta glasses there's a whole new level of discomfort when humans are mobilised as extractive data sensors. Granted that's often closely connected to social media, where the end point of that data is on public display, or more personal interests where the act of observing is easily imagined as a perverted extraction for the edification of the connected actor. Both things which are more easily parsed as undesirable features of our cultural and social experiences than the more remote act of extracting to the cloud for the sole use of mechanical data training.
The push for more and more overt expressions of the surveillance needs of AI companies however may be a path to broadening those concerns and highlighting the extractions that, while less human, are no less invasive. A cleaner wearing a camera to record every inch of your private space may not connect to a sleezy TikTokker but in the humanisation of the work of extraction there is now a discernible and readable face to the process. While we can all block out the ubiquitous presence of static cameras, or vehicle based ones, the human who comes into our home, or into our work, or into our social spaces with a constant and passive desire to extract and datafy our lives is a far less oblique presence.
How we react to that and how we frame it within our societies is an ongoing process and one we can all participate in. Certainly loudly rejecting gimmicks like these free cleaners is an easy starting point, as is ostracising those who use things like Meta glasses*. Beyond that however it's on us to find ways to object and push back against what are likely to be ever more pervasive expressions of the endless data hunger of AI companies. At least we can be certain now that they're not going to run out of content to consume until they either monitor everything or we wire their gaping maw shut.
- Dylan
*Nearby Glasses is an app for detecting the presence of smart glasses for those who might want to know about them.