Ghost Workers is a cinematic research project in collaboration with Erasmus University Rotterdam (NL) into the people conducting the often hidden labor necessary to make artificial intelligence work. Most AI systems rely on human labor to generate, annotate, and verify data. These tasks are performed by millions of data workers, often via ‘microworking’ platforms, executing fragments of large-scale data projects.
The project zooms in on the daily life of the so-called ‘ghost workers,’ a term referring to the invisible and precarious labour powering global technological and AI infrastructures. Based on 130 interviews with European-based workers, we found that the combination of working from home, the absence of an office environment with collegial interaction, the lack of recognition from the platforms that they work for, and being misunderstood by family and friends, often makes workers feel unseen and isolated. Therefore, we invited six workers to physically come together for a two-day meeting. In a filmset in which each of the participants’ home-offices were re-created, the workers were invited to share their work experiences with each other.
Focusing on the theme of isolation and recognition as a ‘real worker,’ the film project expands the existing ethnographic research to engage in a collective conversation about this type of work.