Algorithmic services extract unpaid user labor that trains the very algorithms
Evidence
Every time we go online to enjoy the services of these algorithms, we have no option but to cut a Faustian deal with their owners. To use the personalised services their algorithms provide, we must submit to a business model based on the harvesting of our data, the tracking of our activity, the invisible curating of our content. Once we have submitted to this, the algorithm goes into the business of selling things to us while selling our attention to others. At that point something more profound kicks in which gives the algorithm’s owners immense power – to predict our behaviours, to guide our preferences, to influence our decisions, to change our minds, to thereby reduce us to their unpaid servants, whose job is to provide our information, our attention, our identity and above all the patterns of behaviour that train their algorithms. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 315
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Platform users become unpaid servants who train algorithms.; Quality-content rules extract unpaid user labor benefiting platforms — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms,…, 211; Platforms extract free labor from users in exchange for recognition and perks (+9 more)
Broader Connections
- Platform users become unpaid servants who train algorithms.
#exemplifies(0.95) - Platforms extract free labor from users in exchange for recognition and perks
#expands(0.90) - The ultimate output of AI is turning everyone into unpaid cloud serfs
#exemplifies(0.85) - Platforms extract data as a form of unpaid payment from users
#corroborates(0.85) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 128 - Platform microtask laborers train AI that will eventually displace them
#expands(0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 217 - Modern AI and neural networks transform laborers into cloud proles and users into serfs
#exemplifies(0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 353 - Microtask workers train the AI systems that will replace them
#expands(0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 217 - An everything app charges vendors rent and extracts free labor from users
#expands(0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 513 - Quality-content rules extract unpaid user labor benefiting platforms
#qualifies(0.75) — Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet, 211 - Delivery algorithms capture workers’ tacit route knowledge and render them replaceable.
#exemplifies(0.75) — Donatella della Porta et al., Mobilizing Against the Odds, 102 - Whether unpaid online activity is expression or exploitation structures the digital labor debate
#responds-to(0.75) — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, 113