…work­ers train AI mod­els for often below min­i­mum wage pay. In inter­views with thir­ty-six cur­rent and for­mer free­lance work­ers for the com­pa­ny Scale AI, which has deliv­ered ser­vices for Meta, Microsoft, Ope­nAI and the US Depart­ment of Defense, the Post found pay­ments rou­tine­ly delayed or can­celed. “The bud­get for all this, I know it’s big… None of that is trick­ling down to us,” Paul, one of the work­ers, told them. As the Post wrote, “While AI is often thought of as human-free machine learn­ing, the tech­nol­o­gy actu­al­ly relies on the labor-inten­sive efforts of a work­force spread across much of the Glob­al South and often sub­ject to exploitation.”