Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Three Cheers for Amazon's Human Eavesdroppers

The underpaid and under-appreciated army of humans that make AI work shouldn't be the dirty secret of the tech industry.

April 11, 2019 at 1:38 PM UTC

By Leonid Bershidsky

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Only human, really.
Photographer: Andrew Burton/Bloomberg

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Alexa, are you really a human?

The revelation that a large team of Amazon employees listens to conversations recorded by the company’s digital assistant has exposed the contrast between the hype of artificial intelligence and the reality of the armies of underpaid humans that make the technology work in real life. It is these battalions that are leading Silicon Valley’s massive privacy invasion.