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.

Antonio Casilli, professor of Sociology at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris and co-director of the DiPLab research group, recently featured on Italy’s national radio program Eta Beta, hosted by Massimo Cerofolini on Rai Radio1, to discuss the dark side of artificial intelligence. In the interview, Casilli shed light on the invisible workforce behind AI’s apparent automation—millions of precarious, underpaid workers across Africa, Asia, and South America who perform the “dirty work” powering AI systems. For mere pennies per hour, these digital laborers filter disturbing content including graphic violence and sexual abuse, annotate images and videos, correct algorithm errors, train self-driving cars, and even produce commissioned social media engagement. The DiPLab director, author of the award-winning book Waiting for Robots. The Hired Hands of Automation, also highlighted how everyday users unknowingly contribute free labor to improve AI models like American-made ChatGPT or Chinese-developed DeepSeek, further entrenching this exploitative system.