<
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/22/ai-workers-tell-family-stay-away>
"Krista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion
on the ethics of artificial intelligence. As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical
Turk – a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks
like entering data or matching an AI prompt with its output – Pawloski spends
her time moderating and assessing the quality of AI-generated text, images and
videos, as well as some factchecking.
Roughly two years ago, while working from home at her dining room table, she
took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with
a tweet that read “Listen to that mooncricket sing”, she almost clicked on the
“no” button before deciding to check the meaning of the word “mooncricket”,
which, to her surprise, was a racial slur against Black Americans.
“I sat there considering how many times I may have made the same mistake and
not caught myself,” said Pawloski.
The potential scale of her own errors and those of thousands of other workers
like her made Pawloski spiral. How many others had unknowingly let offensive
material slip by? Or worse, chosen to allow it?
After years of witnessing the inner workings of AI models, Pawloski decided to
no longer use generative AI products personally and tells her family to steer
clear of them.
“It’s an absolute no in my house,” said Pawloski, referring to how she doesn’t
let her teenage daughter use tools like ChatGPT. And with the people she meets
socially, she encourages them to ask AI about something they are very
knowledgable in so they can spot its errors and understand for themselves how
fallible the tech is. Pawloski said that every time she sees a menu of new
tasks to choose from on the Mechanical Turk site, she asks herself if there is
any way what she’s doing could be used to hurt people – many times, she says,
the answer is yes."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
