Karen Hao

Why is it that their appetite for data has actually expanded?

It's because in order to build the next generations of their technologies, in order to have the technologies continue to be relevant and continue to...

with the pace of new knowledge creation and society's evolvement.

They need to train again and again and again and again.

And why are they employing actually more and more and more data annotation workers over time?

It's because they need more and more of that work over time.

I mean, I've been reporting on data annotation work for decades.

I would love to reframe the question and say, what should we be doing in this moment where it's not going down?

Where we do recognize that actually these companies in this moment need continued resources, inputs, and labor to perpetuate what they are doing.

I always say we need to break up the empire and we need to develop alternatives.

And we are already seeing a flourishing of incredible grassroots movements that are applying an enormous amount of pressure to the way that the empire is trying to unfold its agenda.

80% of Americans in the most recent poll think that the AI industry needs to be regulated.

When was the last time that 80% of Americans were on the same side of an issue?

Yeah.

Yeah, dozens of protests against data centers have broken out all around this country in the US, all around the world.

So these are people that are doing something about it.

They are actually reasserting their agency and exercising democratic contestation against the ways that the empires are going about their business.

Yeah, well, the goal is not that we completely get rid of this technology.

The goal is that these companies need to stop being empires.

And the way I define like a typical business versus an empire is that the empires are predicated on this idea that they do not have to provide a fair exchange of value with the workers who work for them or the people who use them or all of the other people that are involved in the supply chain of producing and deploying these technologies.