Succede che quando si spegne una luce, altre si accendano. Per rimediare al buio, innanzitutto. Ma anche perché prende avvio una sorta di trasmissione di energia e di afflati vitali, di propagazione e diffusione di potenza. Come nei vasi comunicanti, il contenuto non sparisce ma viceversa tracima e si distribuisce. Eravamo sulle scale di [...]

RTS, Switzerland’s national television channel, broadcast a report on data annotation platforms between Europe and Africa. As part of the program “A Bon Entendeur,” journalist Linda Bourget interviewed Antonio Casilli, professor at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris and co-director of DiPLab. > ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude: generative artificial intelligence is all around us. > But the power of this technology relies heavily on humans. Behind these tools > are millions of workers who are never talked about. Who are they? What do they > do? Why are they invisible? A report from Geneva to Nairobi. > > All these tasks outsourced abroad help improve the artificial intelligence we > use here. But you may have noticed that some of the answers provided by tools > such as ChatGPT and others are very local. To achieve this result, annotators > are also recruited in Switzerland. Another face of the precariousness of AI > workers.

DiPLab continues its collaboration with Valori.it, the Italian editorial hub specializing in ethical finance and sustainable economy issues. After Antonio Casilli’s Interview with the Oblò podcast on the risks and fears associated with artificial intelligence, this month we spoke with Unchained about another facet of automation: cashierless stores. Behind the ‘smart’ shop windows and cameras that recognize products, there is in fact an invisible army of ‘data workers’ – often in India or countries where labor is cheap and union protections are weaker – who correct, label, and sometimes mimic the systems to make the experience seem completely automatic.

Has artificial intelligence truly outgrown its “Global South data sweatshop” phase? The recent deluge of “AI tutor” job advertisements on LinkedIn targeting highly qualified candidates with advanced degrees might suggest so. When Sam Altman claims his chatbot is “PhD-level smart,” one might assume this reflects a genuine shift toward elite expertise in AI training. However, groundbreaking investigative reporting published by Africa Uncensored reveals a more troubling reality: these recruitment campaigns represent elaborate investor-facing theatrics rather than meaningful industry evolution. DiPLab applauds the exceptional work of data journalists and Pulitzer Center Artificial Intelligence Accountability fellows Kathryn Cleary and Marché Arends, whose year-long investigation exposed a curious case study in modern AI labor practices. Their research focused on companies like Mindrift and Scale AI’s Outlier, which have been flooding professional networks with advertisements for highly qualified and relatively well-compensated “AI tutors” and “trainers,” primarily targeting workers in high-income countries across North America and Europe. These positions appeared to target elite specialists rather than the typical pool of low-paid data annotators traditionally associated with AI training. The recruitment campaigns seems to suggest that major tech companies, in their aggressive push toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), are now seeking only the most brilliant minds to train sophisticated chain-of-thought models. The Africa Uncensored investigation reveals a starkly different reality. Once recruited, these qualified workers—many holding advanced degrees in physics, philology, and other specialized fields—were left idle for months, barely managing to earn double-digit wages. They were essentially serving as props in an elaborate performance of AI progress, carefully staged to impress investors and signal scalability to potential big tech clients. Meanwhile, on platforms targeting workers in the Global South, such as Mindrift’s sister platform Toloka, recruitment for poorly paid microtasks continued under largely exploitative conditions. This parallel system reveals the persistent nature of what researchers have termed “digital sweatshops.” For DiPLab and its research community, these findings represent “old wine in new bottles.” For nearly a decade, DiPLab researchers have been encountering and interviewing data workers who hold Master’s and Doctoral degrees—experts in their own right across diverse disciplines. Many of these highly qualified individuals remain unemployed due to dysfunction in traditional job markets, or find themselves forced to accept data work that neither matches their specialization nor provides adequate compensation. According to DiPLab co-founder Antonio Casilli, interviewed along prof. Edemilson Paranà and dr. Adio Dinika, in the exposé: “This is the biggest waste of social capital in human history. These people would be, should be, destined to the best jobs because they are probably the best and the brightest of their generation.” The mass recruitment strategy serves a specific economic function within what researchers call “labor hedging”—a tactic where companies amass large pools of workers primarily to signal scalability and attract major contracts. As the investigation revealed, Mindrift alone posted over 5,770 job listings across 62 countries in just four months, yet provided minimal actual work opportunities. This approach allows platforms to maintain what they euphemistically term “talent pools”—readily available workforces that can be presented to potential clients as evidence of operational capacity. When a major tech company inquires about access to specialized expertise, these platforms can point to their extensive databases of pre-vetted candidates as proof of their ability to deliver at scale. DiPLab’s research situates these practices within the broader context of platform capitalism surrounding AI development. The current AI boom and the associated recruitment theater serve as crucial signals in this speculative environment. As Casilli noted, “Investors are on LinkedIn too, they see this [mass recruitment], it is a signal for them. This looks more like a communications operation.” These platforms understand that LinkedIn functions not merely as a talent acquisition tool, but as a visibility platform for investor audiences. The courageous reporting by Cleary and Arends, supported by Africa Uncensored, an outlet willing to publish investigations that major US and European media often avoid, highlights the critical need for continued scrutiny of AI labor practices. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Italy’s national broadcaster Rai 1 has shined a light on a crucial but often overlooked aspect of artificial intelligence in their program “Codice.” Their recent report reveals the essential truth: AI is built on real human work. As you might expect, this report bears the fingerprints of our team at DiPLab Rai 1, with DiPLab’s co-founder Antonio Casilli being interviewed among the experts of AI supply chains.

At the WORK2025 conference in Turku, Finland, DiPLab co-founders Antonio Casilli and Paola Tubaro presented the results of their ongoing research documenting the human labor networks that power artificial intelligence systems worldwide. Casilli’s keynote (video 00:29-1:36:00), “Where does AI come from? Global circulation of data and human labor behind automation,” emphasized that AI systems are fundamentally built upon hidden human labor—specifically digital annotation, verification, transcription, moderation, and impersonation of data. This labor is fragmented, precarious, and carried out through digital platforms, predominantly by workers in the Global South who remain unrecognized in dominant AI discourses. Casilli presentation starts with an excerpts from the documentary In the Belly of AI (co-written with Julien Goetz and directed by Henri Poulain), describing the working conditions of women annotating data and producing AI from Finnish prisons for 3 euros per day. In the rest of his keynote speech, drawing from the decade-long research of the DiPLab program, Casilli explored how data work is organized across Africa, Asia, Latin America, as well as Europe and North America, revealing models that support different types of data tasks while reinforcing enduring inequalities in wages, job security, and working conditions that particularly affect Global South workers. He highlighted the increasingly convoluted nature of these supply chains involving several intermediaries—from global tech firms to local freelancers—spanning continents, making it extremely challenging to trace accountability and working conditions. Tubaro’s presentation, “Women in the loop: the gendered contribution of data workers to AI,” examined who actually performs this crucial but undervalued work, focusing on women’s participation as the market has expanded. While data work appears theoretically well-suited for women since it can be performed remotely from home and platforms generally limit direct gender discrimination, statistical evidence reveals mixed patterns with women exceeding 50% of data workers in only four documented cases. Her research showed that in crisis-stricken countries like Venezuela, international platforms attract highly qualified workers in fierce competition, often dominated by young men with STEM backgrounds who crowd out women constrained by care responsibilities or fewer technical qualifications. Conversely, in more dynamic economies like Brazil, local job markets absorb highly skilled professionals, leaving platform work to more disadvantaged groups where women with family duties become more visible. This creates a paradox where women may be equally educated but lack time to cultivate advanced STEM skills, and as platforms demand longer, more specialized tasks, men increasingly gain advantages even in countries where women were once the majority. Both presentations converged on a critical insight: platform design treats workers as abstract entities, stripped of socio-economic and cultural contexts that shape real inequalities, while competition combined with local conditions deepens gender and regional disparities. sq

DiPLab researchers Paola Tubaro and Antonio Casilli recently completed a research mission to Santiago, Chile, participating in key academic events that advanced understanding of artificial intelligence’s social and environmental dimensions. Tubaro delivered a keynote address at the 4th annual workshop of the Millennium Nucleus on the Evolution of Work (M-NEW), where she serves as a senior international member. The interdisciplinary workshop convened labor scholars from across Latin America and internationally to examine contemporary work transformations. Her presentation drew on DiPLab’s multi-year research program investigating the invisible human labor underlying global AI production. Tubaro’s analysis traced the evolution of this work form over two decades, demonstrating that while core functions in smart system development have remained consistent, the scope and volume of these tasks have expanded significantly. Tubaro and Casilli also participated in the inaugural meeting of SEED (“Social and Environmental Effects of Data connectivity: Hybrid ecologies of transoceanic cables and data centers in Chile and France”), a new collaborative research project between DiPLab and the Millennium Nucleus FAIR (“Futures of Artificial Intelligence Research”). The project has received joint funding from the ECOS-SUD programme (France) and ANID (Chile) to analyze the complete AI value chain, examining production, development, employment impacts, usage patterns, and environmental consequences through comparative study of the Valparaíso-Santiago de Chile and Marseille-Paris corridors. In their SEED presentations, Tubaro and Casilli introduced the concept of the “dual footprint” as an analytical framework for understanding the interconnected environmental and social impacts of AI systems. This heuristic device captures commonalities and interdependencies between AI’s effects on natural and social environments that provide resources for its production and deployment. DiPLab researchers framed the AI industry as a transnational value chain that perpetuates existing global inequalities. Countries driving AI development generate substantial demand for inputs while externalizing social costs through the value chain to more peripheral actors. These arrangements distribute AI’s costs and benefits unequally, resulting in unsustainable practices and limiting upward mobility for disadvantaged countries. The dual footprint framework demonstrates how environmental and social dimensions of AI emerge from similar structural dynamics, providing a unified approach to understanding AI’s comprehensive impact on global resource systems.

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.

Antonio Casilli, professor at Institut Polytechnique de Paris and author of Waiting for Robots. The Hired Hands of Automation (University of Chicago Press, 2025), was interviewed by Radio Onda Rossa, one of the oldest independent Italian “free” radios. The name of the program was Entropia Massima (Maximum Entropy) and the topic was Data Extractivism, Artificial Intelligence, and work. https://archive.degenerazione.xyz/download/ent_max_24_25_202411/puntata_EDD8_NR.mp3 The first part examines artificial intelligence from the perspective of the hidden labor that makes it work. Casilli explains that behind every algorithm, chatbot, or app lies a vast network of often invisible, underpaid workers who train and moderate AI systems. The discussion links digital exploitation to automation, showing that human labor is not eliminated but merely relocated and made less visible. In the second part, the focus turns to “invisibilized labor” in the age of platforms and AI. Casilli describes how many digital workers, even in Europe, remain hidden from public view, often bound by confidentiality agreements and precarious conditions. The segment highlights the historical continuity of hidden labor, drawing parallels between past practices and new forms of global exploitation that move from physical assembly lines to cognitive and digital ones. The third part addresses political and labor perspectives, including grassroots union initiatives, collective legal actions, and the idea of AI cooperatives. It also discusses the concept of a “digital universal income” as a way to redistribute value and recognize the contributions of both “data workers” and user-consumers, stressing the need for social justice adapted to the changes brought by automation. To read the full transcript of the episode, click here.

DiPLab’s Antonio Casilli was interviewed by journalist Massimo Cerofolini in the show EtaBeta on Radio1 Rai, italian national radio brodcast. Here’s the complete interview. Their conversation revolves around two recent stories, that reveal deeper truths about today’s tech and political landscapes. First, Builder.ai—a company claiming full automation in app development—was exposed as relying on hundreds of human developers in India. It’s another example of tech companies disguising cheap labor as artificial intelligence, a pattern long studied by researchers at DiPLab. Second, how Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s breakup isn’t just a personal feud. It reflects a deeper conflict between two forms of right-wing capitalism: Trump’s old-school, protectionist, real estate-driven model vs. Musk’s futuristic, tech-centered, data-fueled empire. According to Casilli, both are authoritarian and exploitative, but they represent competing visions of power and profit.