'Absolute no' Meet the AI workers who warn family not to use AI

Krista Pawloski remembers the single defining moment that shaped her opinion on the ethics of artificial intelligence.

- Varsha Bansal

As an AI worker on Amazon Mechanical Turk - a marketplace that allows companies to hire workers to perform tasks like entering data - Pawloski spends her time moderating and assessing the quality of Al-generated text, images and videos, as well as some factchecking.

Roughly two years ago, while working from home, she took up a job designating tweets as racist or not. When she was presented with a tweet that read "Listen to that mooncricket sing", she almost clicked on the "no" button before deciding to check the meaning of the word. To her surprise, it was a racial slur against Black Americans.

"I sat there considering how many times I may have made the same mistake and not caught myself," said Pawloski.

The potential scale of her own errors made her spiral. How many others had unknowingly let offensive material slip by - or worse, chosen to allow it? After years of witnessing the inner workings of AI models, Pawloski decided to no longer use generative AI products, sometimes called large language models (LLMS), and tells her family to steer clear of them.

"It's an absolute 'no' in my house," said Pawloski, referring to how she doesn't let her teenage daughter use tools like ChatGPT.

She encourages friends to ask AI about something they know a lot about so they can spot its errors and understand how fallible the tech is.

A statement from Amazon said workers could choose which Mechanical Turk tasks to complete at their discretion and review its details before accepting it.

"Amazon Mechanical Turk is a marketplace that connects businesses and researchers, called requesters, with workers to complete online tasks, such as labelling images, answering surveys, transcribing text or reviewing AI outputs," said Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson.