«A veces la gente cree que, por ejemplo, está hablando con un chatbot sexual y en realidad es un trabajador de Kenia precarizado»

No dejen de ver esta entrevista de @norabar.bsky.social con @milamiceli.bsky.social derribando mitos frutos del hype en torno a la IA: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcDb...

Now imagine sharing your private fantasies with what you believe is a bot that cannot judge or remember. Just that, on the other side, is a man in a one-room home in Nairobi, pretending to be an AI companion.

That man is Michael, and this is his story: data-workers.org/michael/

Or when the CEO of Fireflies admitted that his supposedly AI-powered transcription service originally ran on “two guys surviving on pizza“?
www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/...

Or the CEO of shopping startup Nate, who was charged with fraud for telling investors and customers that their system was powered by AI, but instead used human labor in the Philippines and Romania?
fortune.com/2025/04/11/a...

Remember the Amazon “Just Walk Out” supermarkets that were marketed as automated but actually relied on thousands of data workers in India?
www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just...

But Michael's story isn't an exception. AI impersonation is far more widespread than most people think.

Thank you, Karen! Your work has been a great source of inspiration as we developed the methodology

In sum, this work is not only a methodological account but a proposal for reorienting AI research toward worker-led knowledge rather than extraction.

Read the full article here: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...

Finally, WIRM fosters what Gramsci called "organic intellectuals" embedded in the material conditions and collective struggles of their class. It cultivates networks of solidarity and tools for analysis generated from within worker communities.
See for instance: data-workers.org/DLA/

Second, we bring this approach into the AI domain. WIRM provides a way to illuminate the human labor underpinning AI systems while allowing workers to define the terms of that illumination.
Our repository is proof of that: data-workers.org#Inquiries

First, we systematize Workers’ Inquiry as a Research Methodology (WIRM). We focus on its political grounding, its architecture, and its operationalization, offering a step-by-step guide, examples, and a discussion of challenges and tensions.

Workers’ inquiry operates both as a research strategy and a political practice: a way to produce situated knowledge, reveal structures of exploitation, create space for workers to theorize their own conditions, and, crucially, to organize.

Our contributions are several: