Today’s conference, held at Télécom Paris by Antonio Casilli and titled “AI Everywhere, Labor Everywhere,” was the occasion to revisit almost a decade of work across 30 countries. For the past 10 years, DiPLab has been researching data work in various countries, unveiling hidden labor, poor working conditions, and power dynamics, alongside AI supply chains. Recently, our research has expanded beyond strictly focusing on labor to include other dynamics and larger consequences of data work and data infrastructures, such as environmental impacts, postcolonial dependencies, and the overall hidden costs of AI. On this occasion, we are thrilled to announce that DiPLab now stands for Digital Infrastructures, Power and Labor. We are also thrilled to announce that new members are joining us on this journey. FACULTY Pauline Gourlet: Designer and Associate Professor at Télécom Paris. She conducts action research and investigates controversies related to digital infrastructures, particularly data centres, and studies actual work practices, particularly workers’ negotiating capacities. She is a member of L’Atelier des chercheurs, a collective of designers that produces digital tools. Tiphaine Viard: Sociologist and computer scientist, Associate Professor at Télécom Paris. She maps the worlds of AI and investigates how information circulates between different actors and institutions, with the aim of making the hidden costs of AI tangible. Laure Muselli: Associate Professor in Management Sciences at Télécom Paris. She studies volunteer work and cooperation in free software, and investigates the transformation of professions related to digital technologies. Louis Pape: Economist and Associate Professor at Télécom Paris. His researches focuses on the impact of technological advances on labour markets, as well as competition and regulatory issues in digital sectors RESEARCH ENGINEERS Stella Lopez: Sociologist, adjunct lecturer at Télécom Paris and research engineer (projetcts SEED and VOLI). Her research focus on resistance within data work. PHD Adrián Lombera: Interaction designer and PhD candidate researching artificial intelligence, based in Barcelona. He teaches AI and digital product design at the Elisava (Barcelona School of Design and Engineering). Neil Seghier: PhD candidate at EHESS (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences), Paris, France. His research examines content moderation and its legal frameworks as well as the regulation of digital platforms RESEARCH ASSOCIATES Joan Kinyua: President of the Data Labelers Association (DLA), a worker-led organisation based in Nairobi. DLA defends the rights of the data workers who train AI systems, campaigning for fair pay, mental health support and better working conditions. Marco Marrone: Researcher in sociology of work at the University of Salento. His research focuses on platform capitalism, digital labour and algorithmic management. More recently, his work has turned to the hidden human labour behind artificial intelligence, including data work and content moderation. With this expanded research agenda and new members joining the team, DiPLab looks forward continuing its investigation of the social, political, economic and environmental dimensions of digital infrastructures and AI.

DiPLab’s Paola Tubaro and Thomas Le Bonniec have been interviewed on Tout un monde, the podcast of Swiss public broadcaster RTS (Radio Télévision Suisse), to discuss the people behind artificial intelligence and the challenges posed by increasingly widespread digital surveillance. Paola Tubaro, co-director of DiPLab, provides a general overview of data workers and their crucial contribution to the development and functioning of artificial intelligence systems. Drawing on several years of research, she explains how AI relies on human labour involved in collecting, processing, annotating and moderating data. Thomas Le Bonniec, PhD candidate at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, discusses DiPLab’s latest report, Surveillance at Scale, which examines the widespread use of surveillance technologies and the challenges they pose to fundamental rights and individual privacy. He also explains the significance of the five complaints filed in several European countries by DiPLab, noyb.eu and other partner NGOs.

On Wednesday, October 21, Antonio Casilli, founder of DiPLab, was invited by François Picard to take part in a debate on France 24 English, in a programme entitled “AI on the Ballot? Voters in US Midterms Revolt Against Data Centres.” During the programme, Antonio reminded the audience that data centres, in addition to consuming vast amounts of energy, water and other resources, require very little human labour once they have been built. As a result, they generate few employment opportunities in the long term. A documentary excerpt also showed how the constant low-frequency humming noise produced by the cooling fans of data centre servers can negatively affect the health and quality of life of neighbouring residents, while also driving down property values. Antonio also pointed out that, until recently, data centres were predominantly located in the Global North, with around 40% of them in the United States. However, they are increasingly being established in the Global South, where land is cheaper, regulations are often less stringent, and water, energy and other resources can be extracted more easily. Later in the debate, Antonio challenged the idea that tech titans could be considered philanthropists. He analysed their recent outbursts of charity, such as Elon Musk’s proposal to give every child in the United States a share of SpaceX, arguing that such gestures could be understood as attempts to appease public anger and pre-empt calls for the nationalisation of their companies.

On October 16, Bloomberg published an article about highly paid experts entering the data work industry. Until recently, data work platforms were known for offering low wages and requiring little formal qualification. However, we have recently seen data work companies offering much higher rates, sometimes reaching $400 an hour for professionals in specialised fields such as radiography, software engineering, and civil rights law. Antonio Casilli, co-founder of DiPLab, explains that these so-called “expert” data annotators are, in fact, only assigned a very small portion of the tasks available on these platforms. DiPLab’s recent report, Surveillance at Scale, already addresses this issue, showing how these experts are given only a limited number of tasks before being sidelined by the platform. Advertising recruitment campaigns targeting highly qualified professionals could benefit AI companies by creating the impression among the general public that their products are trained by PhD-level experts, while the vast majority of the work continues to be performed by precarious, underpaid workers. Mercor, one of these companies, claims to pay its workers an average of $110 an hour. Prolific, meanwhile, claims that 30% of its workforce consists of experts. Both companies have declined to provide further details to substantiate these claims. Read the article here (subscription based) Illustration: By Planetary AI and Techworker Community Africa DOI: https://doi.org/10.7488/era/7341 ©2026 Njung’e Wanjiru, Mohammad Amir Anwar, Beatrice Bonami, Srravya Chandhiramowuli, Richard Mathenge, and Mophat Okinyi. All rights reserved. Illustrator: Njung’e Wanjiru

DiPLab is releasing a report on the surveillance of data workers today. Entitled “Surveillance at Scale : How AI training platforms gather personal data from European workers” this report is a research project in collaboration with Reversing.works and Intérêt à Agir, funded by the Digital Freedom Fund and the European Artificial Intelligence & Society Fund. International technology companies collect vast amounts of personal data from European citizens. Public debate and policymaking often focus on data taken from consumers through e-commerce, social media, or streaming platforms. Yet many Europeans also use digital platforms to work and train AI systems. Online freelance platforms are usually discussed in terms of low pay and insecure “gigs”. Much less attention is given to another resource these platforms extract from workers: their personal data. This report examines the case of Outlier, a key data work platform for artificial intelligence. Outlier is operated by Scale AI, a company that recruits workers to perform tasks such as evaluating AI-generated responses, creating training data, and improving AI models. This report shows how digital platforms rely on data workers worldwide, including in the EU, to label, check, and organize training data. These data are harvested online. But Outlier also collects workers’ personal data, financial records, biometric information, and even facial recognition scans. This data is used for surveillance purposes, and probably for further AI training purposes. Our interdisciplinary team analyzes the evidence collected from qualitative interviews, network logs, and guidelines, to provide evidence of a large-scale data collection process, through hidden trackers. We also provide a legal analysis in terms of likely European law (GDPR) data protection violations : the AI WORLd project reveals how the EU has become a periphery for data extractivism in the production process of AI models. Ethical AI requires the ethical treatment of the modern-day factory workers whose work makes it possible. Beyond the economic exploitation data workers through inadequate compensation, this report reveals the extraction of personal data for purposes ranging from covert AI training to potential military applications. These practices raise serious concerns about social justice, labor law, and European data security. Surveillance_at_scale_diplab_october_2026Download To site this report : Thomas Le Bonniec , Antonio A. Casilli, Mathilde Abel, Simone Robutti, Gaetano Priori, Donatella D., Paul S. Surveillance at Scale : How AI Training Platforms Gather Personal Data from European Workers DiPLab / Reversing.Works report, 2026.

In a recent article for Nouvel Obs, Thomas Lebonniec and Neil S. question the intentions behind a proposed law to ban children under the age of fifteen from accessing social media. Their argument is straightforward: protecting children online is a legitimate and urgent concern, but age restrictions should not become a pretext for introducing systematic digital identity controls at the expense of fundamental privacy rights. For the authors, identity verification is a strategy of obfuscation: by placing the emphasis on users’ identities and ages, it risks diverting attention from the ways in which platforms themselves produce and regulate harmful content, while opening the door to forms of mass surveillance in the name of protecting minors online. Lebonniec instead calls on policymakers to take a closer look at data workers, and more specifically at content moderators, the workers who put platforms moderation guidelines into practice. Their work can help explain why some accounts identified as belonging to sexual predators are not removed, why potentially dangerous content remains online, and why harmful material can sometimes slip through the platforms’ moderation systems. This, in turn, means that legislators should pay closer attention to both the moderation guidelines themselves and the working conditions under which moderators apply them. These workers are routinely exposed to disturbing and psychologically demanding content, often at the cost of their own mental health, while being paid very little for work that is central to the safety and governance of digital platforms. Read the full article in French here

The public debate on work remains largely focused on quantity: are companies hiring or laying off? How many jobs will AI replace? Much less attention is paid to a more fundamental question: what is happening to the quality of work? It turns out that job quality is shaped by a wide range of factors, including gender, environmental conditions, migration, precarity, multiple jobholding, and, increasingly, technology. These questions are addressed in « Job Quality in a Turbulent Era », a new volume edited byAgnieszka Piasna andJanine Leschke, published today. The book brings together contributions that examine how work is being reconfigured in the context of ongoing economic and technological transformations. Among them, Paola Tubaro, and Antonio Casilli, analyze how AI and platformization are “fissuring” contemporary workplaces, and what this means for job quality across sectors. The full volume is available in open access via Edward Elgar Publishing It can be freely downloaded and used for research, teaching, or whatever else you do for a living 

DiPLab associate, Julian Possada (Assistant Professor at Yale University) was recently interviewed by Seth Camillo and Caroline Risberg for the podcast The Internet is Crack. In his book, “Platform Extractivism: Data Work and the People Powering Artificial Intelligence“, forthcoming at the University of California Press in October 2026, he examines the often invisible labor that makes AI and digital platforms possible, focusing on the workers, data practices, and extractive processes that underpin today’s AI systems. In this one-hour-long podcast, Julian Possada discusses the hidden labour behind artificial intelligence, how platforms source work from workers in the Global South, what this type of work actually entails, and how it perpetuates colonial patterns. He draws a few examples from his books and discusses the reality of data workers in Venezuela, a country specifically targeted by data annotation platforms because of its widespread internet access and the inflation crisis that has been ongoing for several years. You can listen to the podcast on Youtube

Thomas Le Bonniec was interviewed by Pierric Marissal for L’Humanité about Palantir Technologies and its growing presence in Europe. The journalist describes Palantir as a technofascist company that profits from the military and war industries and actively contributes to the development of a mass-surveillance society. Thomas Le Bonniec also highlights Palantir’s strong presence in Europe, including within political circles. Perhaps surprisingly — or perhaps not — the company has found significant support among social-democratic parties. In France, the Socialist Party appointed Julie Martinez, a former Palantir data protection officer, as spokesperson and later as a candidate in Clichy-la-Garenne. Asked about Palantir’s role in tracking migrants in the US, she dismissed it as “fake news,” while expressing pride in the company’s work with France’s intelligence agency, the DGSI. She was also endorsed by the French Communist Party (PCF). In Switzerland, meanwhile, the government has stated that it does not want to work with Palantir, amid concerns that the company could act as a “Trojan horse” for US intelligence and mass data collection. In the UK, the Labour government signed a £240 million, three-year contract with Palantir, while the German army has been using Palantir software for at least two years. As Thomas Le Bonniec puts it: > “It is impossible to be antifascist while collaborating with Palantir. It is > impossible to be pro-European and collaborate with Palantir. It is antinomic.” Read the full article in L’Humanité:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the Belly of AI, directed and written by Henri Poulain and DiPLab’s own Antonio A. Casilli, takes research out of academic journals and into television screens and cinemas. Over the coming weeks, the documentary is screening across Europe bringing open questions about the human and environmental cost of AI to new audiences. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 14 April 2024 — Stockholm, Sweden Bio Skandia A free public screening at Stockholm’s Bio Skandia cinema. A panel discussion follows, with Teresa Cerratto Pargman, Melanie R., Anna Essén and Johan Fredrikzon representing Stockholm University, KTH, the Swedish Red Cross, and Stockholm School of Economics. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19 April 2026 — Rotterdam, Netherlands Kino Rotterdam, 10:30–13:30 Hosted by SocTalk and the Platform Labor Group, EUR A free screening followed by a live discussion with screenwriter Antonio A. Casilli, joined by platform work and AI researchers Damion Bunders (UU), Francisca Grommé (EUR), Floor Fiers (UvA), João Gonçalves (EUR), and Martien Schaub (EUR). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 30 April 2026 — Rome, Italy CGIL Nazionale, Corso d’Italia 25 (TBA) Italy’s largest trade union confederation screens the film at its national headquarters, in preparation for May Day. Director Henri Poulain will join live via video link. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------