DiPLab Researchers Expose AI’s Hidden Labor Crisis in New AlgorithmWatch Investigation

A recent AlgorithmWatch investigation featuring DiPLab co-director Antonio Casilli and affiliate Milagros Miceli exposes the systematic exploitation of data workers powering the generative AI boom. Authored by journalists Michael Bird and Nathan Schepers, the article, published in English on AlgorithmWatch and in German in the newspaper Taz, is titled “The AI Revolution Comes With the Exploitation of Gig Workers”. The findings align perfectly with DiPLab’s ongoing research mission: revealing the hidden human labor that makes artificial intelligence possible.

“This has been business as usual for those companies and platforms for a number of years,” Casilli explains in the investigation. “Since the beginning, they have been predicated on wage theft.” Meanwhile, Miceli, sociologist and computer scientist at the Weizenbaum Institute Berlin, argues that BPO companies strategically “give the impression that training is a form of qualification,” making unpaid work seem like a bonus rather than exploitation.

The investigation reveals how AI companies like Scale AI and Outlier rely on vast networks of precarious workers who face unpaid training time, wage theft, and systematically violated labor standards. “Unpaid time that is attached to this type of work is a form of exploitation,” Miceli adds, noting how workers often don’t even recognize wage theft because it’s become so normalized in the gig economy.

The AlgorithmWatch investigation proves that DiPLab’s research agenda remains urgently relevant. The AI revolution is here—but it’s built on the backs of workers whose stories deserve to be told and whose rights deserve protection.