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For the “teachers” in North America, this slightly decent job is not a long-term solution.

The Translation Bureau is a compilation team that focuses on technology, business, workplace, life and other fields, focusing on foreign new technologies, new ideas, and new trends.

Editor’s note: There is no doubt that the field of artificial intelligence is undergoing rapid development and progress every day. However, in many countries around the world, including China, there is an emerging profession that you may not know. They are responsible for teaching artificial intelligence systems. They are the most lovely people in the group. Some people call them digital Foxconn “first-line workers.” This translation from the New York Times article, the original title is A.I. Is Learning From Humans. Many Humans, author Cade Metz in the article introduced the relevant stories of this industry. This is the next part of this series, which introduces the story of this emerging profession in North America. In the previous middle section, the article introduced the story of this emerging profession in India.

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Oscar Cabezas is at iMerit’s office in New Orleans. Image source: Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times

Listening to other people’s cough all day

A few weeks after returning from India, I traveled through Uber through downtown New Orleans. In the 18 months before that, iMerit opened a branch office in New Orleans, with its office opposite the Mercedes Benz dome.

A large US technology company then needed to tag the Spanish version of its home digital assistant product. So the company sent the data to iMerit, which just landed in New Orleans.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hundreds of construction workers moved with their families.The city of New Orleans helped to rebuild the city. After the reconstruction, many people chose to stay. Among them, many people have a native language of Spanish. As a result, iMerit began recruiting them.

23-year-old Oscar Cabezas, who moved with his mother from New Orleans, the capital of South Carolina, USA. Kabesas’s stepfather found a job on a construction site. After graduating from college, Kabesas entered iMerit directly, when the company was just preparing to help customers mark the Spanish version of the home digital assistant products.

Kabesas’s information covers a wide range of areas, including tweets and restaurant reviews, as well as identifying people, places, and identifying areas of ambiguity. For example, in Guatemala (Latin American countries), “Pisto” means “money”; but in Mexico, it refers to “beer”. “I will receive new projects every day,” said Cabesas.

In the New Orleans city of iMerit, the business quickly expanded to other areas, and their clientele wanted to keep their data in the United States. Among them, due to legal and security considerations, some project data must be kept in the United States.

42-year-old Glenda Hernandez was born in Guatemala. She said that she missed the work of the digital home assistant product she had previously worked on. She likes reading very much. She has written book reviews for large publishers online and exchanged some books for free. She also enjoys reading in Spanish and can get some compensation from it.

Glenda Hernandez, picture taken at the iMerit New Orleans City Office. Image source: Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times

“It’s like my child,” Hernandez said as he recalled the mission.

For Hernandez, she is not very interested in marking or labeling certain recordings that involve people’s coughing. But that’s a way to build an artificial intelligence system that, when built, can be used to identify the symptoms of the disease in a telephone conversation.

“It’s too disgusting to listen to someone’s cough all day long.. Said Hernandez.

Microsoft anthropologist Gray said that the job is easily misunderstood. Although listening to someone else’s cough all day may be disgusting, it is a real life portrayal of the doctor. “We don’t think this is a tedious chore,” Gray said.

Hernandez’s work is designed to help doctors do their jobs better. Maybe one day, they can even replace their work. She is very proud of this.

In the past, you can make a living, but you can’t do it now

Kristy Milland from Toronto, who has been working on the Amazon AMT platform for 14 years, is responsible for data tagging. Image source: Arden Wray for The New York Times

In 2005, Christie Milan registered and claimed her first job on the Amazon AMT platform. She was 26 years old and lived in Toronto with her husband. Her husband is the administrator of a local warehouse. For Milan, the AMT platform is a place to earn extra money.

The first task she did was Amazon’s own post. Milan’s laptop will pop up three pictures of a store, and then she needs to choose the picture that shows the front door of the store. At the time, Amazon was providing Google with a similar online service like Google Street View, so it needed the help of an outside workforce to pick the best photo.

For every click, Milan can successfully earn 3 cents. It can be successfully clicked six times per minute, so it can bring her about 18 cents in revenue. In 2010, Milan’s husband lost his job, and this part-time part-time job in Milan became her full-time odd jobs. In the next two years, she worked 6 to 7 days a week, sometimes working more than 17 hours a day. In this state of work, she earns about $50,000 a year.

“At the time, I was able to make a living from this income, but now I can’t do it,” Milan said.

At the time, Milan’s work did not involve artificial intelligence. For example, another task she has done is to extract information from various mortgage documents, or manually enter the wrong name and address of the business card scan. Sometimes, you can only earn $1 an hour.

Image Source: iMerit

In 2010, Milan also began to label data for artificial intelligence projects. The data she has labeled has varied, including brutal images on Twitter (Twitter was building an artificial intelligence system designed to quickly and efficiently remove brutal images on social media), or in the Middle East. Aerial lens data taken at the location (possibly the military and its partners are building an artificial intelligence system to identify the drone reconnaissance target).

Milan also mentioned that if it is a project commissioned by a US technology giant, it will usually receive a higher salary than the average project, about $15 an hour. But unfortunately, this job does not provide medical insurance or paid holidays, and doing this job for a long time may make people extremely uneasy and even numb. She also called it “extremely terrible exploitation.” In response, Amazon declined to comment.

Since 2012, Milan has been a member of an organization called TurkerNation. This organization aims to improve the working conditions of thousands of people working in similar jobs. In April of this year, after 14 years in this job, Milan, 40, finally gave up the odd jobs.

Now, she entered the law school to study. Her husband’s income is $600 per month for fixed rents, and does not include utilities. Therefore, Milan said that they are also preparing to start a debt life. But no matter what, Milan will not go back to do the work of marking data.

“This is a dystopian future.” Milan said, “I have had enough.”

• Extended reading: There is an emerging profession called Teacher of Artificial Intelligence (Part 1)

• Extended reading: There is a new profession called Teacher of Artificial Intelligence (Middle)

Translator: Ishii Junichi