Ghost Work. Hidden Humans. Smart Machines.

Watch this trailer. It's only 73 seconds.

Somewhere... far from the clean offices of Silicon Valley, thousands of people sit in dim rooms, clicking, labeling, filtering.

They are called annotators, moderators, raters.

The world calls it automation. They call it work.

Anonymous, with contracts. They see the worst, and at times hold immense power.

DELETE. DELETE. IGNORE. IGNORE. The sound of their days.

Did you know?

2023. A Time investigation found that OpenAI’s contractor Sama paid Kenyan data workers less than $2 an hour to label violent and sexually explicit content for Chat's training. My DEAR friend Chat... Many reported trauma, nightmares, and panic attacks (makes sense if you watch that all day...).

In Colombia, Teleperformance moderators for TikTok made around $10 a day, reviewing murders and child abuse footage. Hello????

These workers exist everywhere... in Nairobi, Manila, Bogotá, Accra...everywhere. Doing this for all platforms.

“They see the worst of the internet so that we don’t have to.”— The Cleaners (2018)

Psychologically, this is vicarious traumatization, yet these thousands of workers remain invisible, hidden beneath layers of outsourcing that keep “artificial intelligence” looking pure.

AI does not understand meaning. It LEARNS, RELIES from human judgment...every tagged emotion, every flagged image, every decision of what’s acceptable.

The machine’s knowledge is borrowed empathy, compiled from the minds it quietly consumes.

We say technology is replacing human labor. But first, it’s disguising it.

Automation, it turns out, still has fingerprints... just smudged across a global screen.

It makes you think, no? How much darkness hides in the depths of our digital reality, mirroring the darkness of the world itself?

The sheer volume of violent, cruel, and disturbing content online isn’t accidental guys...

It’s a reflection.

A mirror of everything that festers offline: neglect, hunger, power, loneliness. The internet didn’t create this darkness; it just archived it.

We all know of the Dark Web, but how much is out there? And why so much?

And somewhere, far from the glow of our screens, people who can barely afford to eat are paid to stare into it...all day, every day... so that we can scroll in PEACE. Numb. Mindless.

How much are we not seeing?

Allowed to see?

Don't worry, I know it's getting a little too dark, I'll end it here.

Have a delightful day tho.

Sources

Mary L. Gray & Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019)– Time Magazine

“OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers Paid Less Than $2 an Hour” (2023)– The Guardian, “Meta Faces Lawsuits Over Moderators’ Mental Health in Ghana” (2024)– The Cleaners (2018), dir. Hans Block & Moritz Riesewieck– The Moderators (Field of Vision, 2017), dir. Adrian Chen & Ciaran Cassidy