Humans in the Machine: the Impact of AI on workers – Learn More on February 6th

We’re excited to invite you to our first Ethics & Governance Working Group meeting of 2025 on February 6th at 10am ET/ 3pm BST – with a fantastic panel of speakers on the topic of AI and labour –  register here.

During a 1 hour panel discussion we’ll be digging into:

• What role do humans play in the development of AI models?
• What can be the impact on the workers who power machine learning?
• What can we do, as development and humanitarian professionals, to acknowledge and address the human impact of AI model development?

Meet our speakers

As early as 2023, whistleblowers in countries like Kenya started alerting the world about a new form of labour inequity. Hundreds of thousands of data-workers had quietly been engaged by go-between recruiters with data labelling and quality assurance tasks that ultimately shape the success of commercial LLMs. Whilst we all marvel at GenAI powered assistants’ uncanny prowess, majority-country data workers are often left poorly paid (sometimes unpaid), with no job security, under extreme pressure, isolated, and frequently exposed to traumatic content, with little access to appropriate support.

Thankfully, these workers fought back, organising to defend their rights and demand recognition. We’re honored to be joined by Mophat Okinyi, Chairperson of the Content Moderator’s Union, founder and CEO of Techworker Community Africa, and recently named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI 2024, who will tell us more about his first-hand experiences of AI labour, and share his thoughts on how we can all support data workers through scrutinising the models we choose to use.

Another group working to right these wrongs is the Fairwork team from the Oxford Internet Institute, who have developed an assessment framework and guidance for evaluating the labour conditions of data platforms, including LLMs. Oguz Alyanak, postdoctoral researcher, will  be joining us to share practical advice which can be of use when trying to assess the ‘least worst’ platforms, from a labour rights perspective.

Finally, those engaged in fine-tuning LLMs  to make their output more appropriate for our audiences, may wonder what we can learn from these collective failures to protect workers in the commercial sector. Also on our panel will be Maria Mukobi and Kriti Bajpai, data curators, and Soma Mitra-Behura, Data Scientist at Girl Effect, who will share what they learned when carrying out fine-tuning tasks for a sexual health chatbot.

Register now

We hope you’ll join us on February 6th at 10am ET/ 3am BST for this important session –  register here! 

And as always, you can catch up on previous event resources in our public folder. If you’re not already, join the NLP CoP here, and make sure to join the Ethics & Governance Working Group for exclusive invites to similar events.