WEIZENBAUM INSTITUT — Data workers — The working conditions and importance of the people behind AI — A 2023 report from the World Bank published estimates that there are between 150 and 430 million data workers worldwide

Sci­en­tif­ic insights into socalled gen­er­a­tive Arti­fi­cial Intelligence

29 APRIL 2024

How long has this indus­try of data work exist­ed, how much has it grown and is expect­ed to grow?

Data work has exist­ed for­ev­er. The ques­tion is the pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion of the data work­ers and also when it start­ed exist­ing at a scale. That we can track back to the first data work plat­form or data anno­ta­tion plat­form, Ama­zon Mechan­i­cal Turk, that exists since 2005. So almost 20 years. And it’s inter­est­ing to observe the tra­jec­to­ry of the devel­op­ments in the space of AI since MTurk start­ed, what has been enabled by the mere exis­tence of a work­force that sud­den­ly was avail­able at low prices, in a large scale, at 24 /7. So, there is a cor­re­la­tion between the abil­i­ty to hire these work­ers at scale for cheap prices and the abil­i­ty to pro­duce the sys­tems that we know today.

It is very dif­fi­cult to know exact­ly how many data work­ers there are. But there is a report from -

the World Bank published last year that estimates that there are between 150 and 430 million data workers worldwide, and that the number has grown exponentially in the past decade.

The actu­al num­ber is prob­a­bly not too far off.

This also con­tra­dicts those com­ments pre­dict­ing that we won’t need data work­ers in the future. The tasks may change, but the need for them is still there, and it grows.