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https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/05/in-the-end-you-feel-blank-indias-female-workers-watching-hours-of-abusive-content-to-train-ai>
"On the veranda of her family’s home, with her laptop balanced on a mud slab
built into the wall, Monsumi Murmu works from one of the few places where the
mobile signal holds. The familiar sounds of domestic life come from inside the
house: clinking utensils, footsteps, voices.
On her screen a very different scene plays: a woman is pinned down by a group
of men, the camera shakes, there is shouting and the sound of breathing. The
video is so disturbing Murmu speeds it up, but her job requires her to watch to
the end.
Murmu, 26, is a content moderator for a global technology company, logging on
from her village in India’s Jharkhand state. Her job is to classify images,
videos and text that have been flagged by automated systems as possible
violations of the platform’s rules.
On an average day, she views up to 800 videos and images, making judgments that
train algorithms to recognise violence, abuse and harm.
This work sits at the core of machine learning’s recent breakthroughs, which
rest on the fact that AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. In
India, this labour is increasingly performed by women, who are part of an
workforce often described as “ghost workers”."
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
