The Finnish start-up Metroc has signed an agreement with the maximum security women’s prison in Hämeenlinna (Finland) to use female inmates to train an AI-based search engineas reported by Wired. One of the inmates, interviewed by the Wired correspondent, defined the work as “boring and repetitive”, but still better than “staying in a cell all day”. It’s not the first case where subjects with few employment alternatives, come refugees, citizens of poor countries and now prisoners, they are used to train an AIoften with alienating and mechanical tasks and miserable wages.
How to train an AI that speaks Finnish
Programs based on artificial intelligence allow you to recognize images, faces, and automatically perform hundreds of functions. To train an AI, companies that operate in English use workers from the global South, who live in low-income countries. For example, OpenAI, the company that develops ChartGPT, uses an external company that it hires workers in Kenya, Uganda and India. These workers have the task of explaining to a program how to distinguish a dog from a car, or how to recognize if a post on Instagram incites hatred or racism. In short, it involves spending many hours on the computer cataloging images (labellyng) or answering simple questions, in order to provide the AI with a database of information.
Hämeenlinna Maximum Secure Women’s Prison, Finland. Source: RISE for Wired
When AI works in English, there is no shortage of low-wage workers. The global south is full of citizens who speak English and are willing to work for a few dollars an hour. But how do you train an AI in Finnish? In the global south there are few people who speak Finnish, in fact there are none at all. Furthermore, Finland is one of the richest countries in the world, with very high average salaries, so in this case it is difficult to find low-cost workers to train an AI.
Metroc leaders found the solution in prisons. Thanks to an agreement, the inmates of Hämeenlinna will allow the development of software in Finnish.
Inmates training artificial intelligence
Metroc is a Finnish start-up that has developed software capable of connecting supply and demand in the field of Finnish public procurement. The program analyzes a project and understands whether it already has all the resources necessary to be realized or if it needs professionals to employ. The algorithm is based on artificial intelligence, and can determine whether a hospital already has an architect in charge of defining the environments or a supplier for doors and windows.
To train AI, Metroc has entered into an agreement with Hämeenlinna maximum security prison. Unlike other Finnish prisons, where inmates enjoy a certain amount of freedom during the day, in this case the inmates are never allowed to leave the prison. A journalist from Wired interviewed one of the inmates involved in the program. The girl explained that the work consists of simple tasks, such as answering “yes” or “no” to questions regarding texts shown on a computer. For example, a classic question is: “does the ad shown refer to the real estate market rather than a job offer?”. Shifts last a maximum of 3 hours per day, with a salary of €1.54 per hour.
The prison management promotes the agreement with Metroc, claiming that this agreement provides an income for female inmates and prepares them for the world of work that awaits them outside. However, the tasks are described by the interviewee as “rather boring and repetitive”. Furthermore, the girl also claimed that she is not clear on the purpose of the work she is doing.
The reaction of public opinion
The initiative carried out by Metroc and Hämeenlinna prison has received a certain consensus in Finnish public opinion. Pia Puolakka, director of the Smart Prison project in Finland, was among the first to welcome the initiative proposed by Metroc. “The objective is to bring the world of the internet more and more into prisons, so as not to isolate prisoners from the world” declared Puokkala; Furthermore, “the inmates are absolutely free to join the initiativethey can carry out shifts of up to 3 hours and also have other activities available”, he added.
Gig economy workers protest in California to demand more rights and protections. Source: Megan Rose Dickey/Protocol.
However, other voices were critical of the project. “The narrative that we are moving towards a more automated and efficient society tends to forget the fact that there are real humans behind many of the digital systems” said Amos Toh, a Human Rights Watch researcher specializing in artificial intelligence. Toh recalled that the strong evolution of technology has led to a frantic search for low-cost workers to use to train an AI. Companies also look for labor in groups of people who have no alternative, such as refugees, asylum seekers, citizens of low-income countries and, in this case, prisoners.
Does training an AI allow you to acquire skills? Not exactly
Both Toh and some researchers from the University of Helsinki have also highlighted that It is not yet clear how the repetitive and mechanical tasks performed to train an AI can prepare a person for the digital world of work. Human Rights Watch reiterated that more effective and proven initiatives could be encouraged to provide skills to detainees, such as online coding and computer courses.
Finnish public opinion has willingly accepted Metroc’s initiative because it trusts in the quality of Finland’s prison systemand she is sure that the prisoners involved are fully free to choose what activities to do. But it is necessary to ask ourselves what effects a similar project applied in countries where prison systems are much harsher and less efficient could have. According to a report by the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), in the United States, 75% of prisoners say they are forced to do a job. In such a condition, even the training of an AI could effectively become a form of exploitation.
Il Mechanical Turk
The social impact of the functioning of an AI can be explained with the story of the Mechanical Turk. Between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, a Hungarian inventor created a wooden automatonin the shape of a human dressed as a Middle Easterner (the Turk) and driven by a box full of automated gears. The Mechanical Turk was able to play chess thanks to the secret mechanisms of the box, ed he was such a strong automaton that he beat many chess players of the time, a bit like today’s AI. Legend has it that he also defeated Napoleon at chess.
Illustration of the Mechanical Turk designed in 1770 by Hungarian inventor Wolfgang von Kempelen. The original was destroyed by fire in 1854. Source: Joseph Racknitz – Humboldt University Library.
Everyone wondered the secret of the mechanism. In the end, it turned out that in the box that operated the Turk there were no automatic gears, but simply small man, very good at playing chess, who operated the automaton. Behind the mechanical automation there was nothing other than the work of a man, in flesh and blood.
In 2005, Amazon was inspired by this story to name its own crowdsourcing platform, the Amazon Mechanical Turk. Crowdsourcing platforms allow you to organize and direct the tasks carried out by thousands of human beings around the worldand are used by many companies to train and collect data used by AI.
The underpaid army that makes AI alive
In short words, Amazon’s platform allows you to unpack millions of repetitive operationssuch as classifying images or recognizing violent social content, in small actions to be carried out by thousands of workers at the same time. These actions come reward even a few cents each; this allows us to reduce the costs of developing a technology such as artificial intelligence, thanks to the thousands of workers who live in low-income countries or who have no alternatives to survive.
Companies that boast of being “FullAI”, and completely digital, are actually supported by thousands of workers forced by social circumstances to carry out repetitive and poorly paid activities. These workers do not have full freedom to choose another job, as in the case of a detained person, and in some cases they can earn less than €2 an hourwhile on the other side of the world executives of digital companies receive millionaire investments.