James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant: ‘AI feeds off the work of human beings’

The Fairwork trio talk about their new book on the extraction machine', exposing the repetitive labour, often in terrible conditions, that big tech is using to create artificial intelligence

• Meet Mercy and Anita - the African workers driving the AI revolution, for just over a dollar an hour

James Muldoon is a reader in management at the University of Essex, Mark Graham a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and Callum Cant a senior lecturer at the University of Essex business school. They work together at Fairwork, a project that appraises the working conditions in digital workplaces, and they are co-authors of Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI.

Why did you write the book?
James Muldoon: The idea for the book emerged out of field work we did in Kenya and Uganda on the data annotation industry. We spoke to a number of data annotators, and the working conditions were just horrendous. And we thought this is a story that everyone needs to hear. People working for less than $2 an hour on insecure contracts, work that is predominantly outsourced to the global south because of how difficult and dangerous it can be.