"Scale AI is basically a data annotation hub that does essential grunt work for the AI industry. To train an AI model, you need quality data. And for that data to mean anything, an AI model needs to know what it's looking at. Annotators manually go in and add that context.
As is the means du jour in corporate America, Scale AI built its business model on an army of egregiously underpaid gig workers, many of them overseas. The conditions have been described as "digital sweatshops," and many workers have accused Scale AI of wage theft.
It turns out this was not an environment for fostering high-quality work.
According to internal documents obtained by Inc, Scale AI's "Bulba Experts" program to train Google's AI systems was supposed to be staffed with authorities across relevant fields. But instead, during a chaotic 11 months between March 2023 and April 2024, its dubious "contributors" inundated the program with "spam," which was described as "writing gibberish, writing incorrect information, GPT-generated thought processes."
In many cases, the spammers, who were independent contractors who worked through Scale AI-owned platforms like Remotasks and Outlier, still got paid for submitting complete nonsense, according to former Scale contractors, since it became almost impossible to catch them all. And even if they did get caught, some would come back by simply using a VPN.
"People made so much money," a former contributor told Inc. "They just hired everybody who could breathe.""
https://futurism.com/scale-ai-zuckerberg-incompetence
#AI #GenerativeAI #Meta #ScaleAI #DataAnnotation #DataLabeling #GigWork
