What is it about?
La Independiente developed a pilot of an AI-powered social connection and recommendation system. It was specifically designed to help collective platform workers build a supportive community and develop their technical and social skills.
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Why is it important?
Workers from Kenya and the Philippines were among the first to be externally employed to label data, but after 2018, 75% of the leading Al crowd work platforms' workforce was Venezuelan (Schmidt, 2019); and it is possible that other Latin American countries will follow in the context of the post covid-19 economic recovery (Hao & Hernandez, 2022). While crowd work present opportunities for income and employment creation in regions where local economies are stagnant (Nickerson, 2014), there are not enough initiatives that address the impact of such work in the Global South through the lens of gender perspective, considering that 1 in every 5 crowd workers in the region are women (Berg & Ram; 2021; Varanasi, et.al, 2022). According to practitioners and researchers in the field, a better future in collaborative work can only be achieved if the key aspects involved, such as transparency and development opportunities, are incorporated into the tools available to collective workers (Kittur et al., 2013; Lease, et. al, 2021).
Perspectives
As crowd workers continue to make crucial contributions to the training and development of advancing AI systems, interest in ensuring they produce quality work has grown. However, previous approaches have neglected to center crowd workers in system designs and to consider their identities, motivations, and well-being. These considerations are important, because they acknowledge crowd workers are not a monolith and may have different needs and goals. Designing a system sensitive to the unique needs of a specific worker population can increase the likelihood of the tool’s usefulness and, by extension, contribute to crowd workers well-being and help them produce better quality work.
Luz Elena Gonzalez
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: La Independiente: Designing Ubiquitous Systems for Latin American and Caribbean Women Crowdworkers, October 2023, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3594739.3610728.
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