Lifting the curtain
Strategic visibility of human labour in AI-as-a-Service
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5260792 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gemma Newlands (0000-0003-0851-384X, BI Norwegian Business School, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Publication date | 2021-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Big Data & Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2053-9517 • E-ISSN: 2053-9517 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/20539517211016026 |
| OpenAlex | W3160182997 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 28 |
| References cited | 85 |
Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service (AIaaS) empowers individuals and organisations to access AI on-demand, in either tailored or 'off-the-shelf' forms. However, institutional separation between development, training and deployment can lead to critical opacities, such as obscuring the level of human effort necessary to produce and train AI services. Information about how, where, and for whom AI services have been produced are valuable secrets, which vendors strategically disclose to clients depending on commercial interests. This article provides a critical analysis of how AIaaS vendors manipulate the visibility of human labour in AI production based on whether the vendor relies on paid or unpaid labour to fill interstitial gaps. Where vendors are able to occlude human labour in the organisational 'backstage,' such as in data preparation, validation or impersonation, they do so regularly, further contributing to ongoing techno-utopian narratives of AI hype. Yet, when vendors must co-produce the AI service with the client, such as through localised AI training, they must 'lift the curtain', resulting in a paradoxical situation of needing to both perpetuate dominant AI hype narratives while emphasising AI's mundane limitations
Business · Cold war · Hospitality · Iron Curtain · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Sociology · Software deployment · Tourism · Vendor · Visibility · AI in Service Interactions · Blockchain Technology Applications and Security · Computer Science · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Law · Marketing
Escape Me If You Can
At the crossroads of logics
Revising research practices for singing data collection
Imploding between the facts and concerns
From explainable to interactive AI
From local hacks to global standards
Artificial intelligence, algorithms, and social inequality
Dis//assemblages of AI
Modeling AI Trust for 2050
The politics of artificial intelligence supply chains
The poverty of ethical AI
Artificial intelligence and work
Artificial Intelligence in the Colonial Matrix of Power
The digital oligarchic public sphere
Human directing the Loop? Rethinking automation through Chinese transnational platform expansion in Oceania
Intelligent toys, complex questions
Uninvited Protagonists
Troubleshooting the connected home
Audible Crime Scenes
Friction and Promise in Data Labor
Artificial intelligence, human intelligence and hybrid intelligence based on mutual augmentation
Cleaning up data work
Why putting artificial intelligence ethics into practice is not enough
Artificial intelligence and skills in the workplace
The digital writing of human rights narratives
The labor of assetization
Sidewalk Toronto and the discursive politics of the real-time city
Sensing and the Shadows
Artificial Intelligence and Management
Turkopticon
Artificial Intelligence in Organizations
How artificial intelligence will change the future of marketing
The Race between Man and Machine
Work as affective experience
Artificial intelligence and rationalized unaccountability
Echoes of myth and magic in the language of Artificial Intelligence
Invisible Labor
Algorithmic Surveillance in the Gig Economy
Labor Out of Place
AI and Its New Winter
Prosumer Capitalism
Chatbots and the new world of HCI
Automation, Labour Justice, and Equality
The three sociological types of consumer work
The cultural work of microwork
Out of sight, out of mind? (In)visibility of/in platform-mediated work
Crowdwork and the mobile underclass
Hot air and corporate sociotechnical imaginaries
Future imaginaries in the making and governing of digital technology
Metaphors in critical Internet and digital media studies
The limits of transparency
Rethinking country effects
Privacy and smart speakers
The virtual stages of hate
Prison media work
Containing the Atom
Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice
Bringing Secrecy into the Open
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Data Cleaners for Pristine Datasets
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Search algorithms, hidden labour and information control
Perspectives on algorithmic normativities
Logged out
Content moderation, AI, and the question of scale
The trainer, the verifier, the imitator
Transparency you can trust
The Overworked Consumer
The platform as factory
Invisible Work
Work, recognition and subjectivity
Digi-Housekeeping
Why Artificial Intelligence Will Not Outsmart Complex Knowledge Work
Mechanisms of invisibility
Introduction to 'Secrecy and Transparency
When I Iron My Son's Shirt, I Feel My Maternal Role
Disembedded or Deeply Embedded? A Multi-Level Network Analysis of Online Labour Platforms
Visibility
| Unique citing works | 28 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 7 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2026 (5) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 28 |