I was crying myself to sleep, wondering if I’d just handed my personal information to scammers. My husband tried to console me, but my gut was screaming what my desperate mind had ignored: this AI job was too good to be true.
Let me back up and tell you how I got here.
There was a time when I was terribly anxious about not knowing where the next source of honey would come from. The anxiety was mainly driven by my past, from living a life of lack, and I don’t want to go back.
While no traditional jobs have employed me yet, I don’t want to do nothing in the meantime. And while in transition, I find the gig economy particularly appealing, as it offers flexibility that a traditional 9-to-5 job lacks. I was also convinced that as long as I have a computer, I can technically work from anywhere.
From my good experience with Upwork, I was naïve enough to think that employers behind the screen always care about you. Upwork provides protection (especially when releasing payments), which I thought was a standard feature on all platforms. That sense of security made me careless about red flags elsewhere. Oh, how I would later learn what a simpleton I was to think this way!
But in a moment of need, I realized how a person would barely think of these things. Finding a job is the priority that I couldn’t care more about the security. Call me reckless, but the desperation surely does make a person do so many things. And lucrative (often clickbait) offers combined with ” sense of purpose” are always promising to a desperate Millennial—add to that a frictionless application process that would make you think, “What’s more to lose when I try sending an application, right?”
While the book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick convinced me that being the human in the loop is important in the age of AI, online jobs that offered this opportunity made me feel special, as if I were part of the movement to make AI more humane.
And who wouldn’t want to be part of a bigger purpose right?
So, after seeing AI job posts on LinkedIn that highlighted how my “unique background” brings humanity to AI, I was eager to apply—too eager to believe how AI jobs are the future.
Then again, I was such a simpleton to believe the things I imagined. My mind was way ahead of reality, so I applied to one before reading more about the company. When I was on the platform (which also meant I had already passed the assessment and given my personal details with consent 😮💨), I noticed how the website looked. As I scrolled through the platform—no activity, no other workers, just me and this eerily quiet interface—something cold settled in my stomach. This wasn’t the future of AI work. This felt like a trap I’d walked into with my eyes wide shut. The website was alarmingly rudimentary, lacking the polish and professionalism I expect from a legitimate business. And that’s when a dreaded word suddenly came out of my disillusioned mind: scam.
I was too gullible to trust fancy-looking adverts and legitimate-sounding website URLs. Too trusting that the world is good.
“Have I just gotten myself into a scam?“
Sleep wouldn’t come until I knew the truth. I recall having a hard time sleeping the same night I applied for an AI job (which I would later learn is mainly focused on data labeling), and even cried myself to sleep. My husband tried to console me by saying that I might be overthinking it. But I’m convinced that the gut often tells the body things the mind can’t, which propelled me to get out of my desperation—to wake up from the call of need and at least for a moment have a reality check.
So, I got to work and started reading about data labeling platforms. Yes, I know. I should have done this before giving in to clickbait job ads. Desperation got the worst of me. As a Reddit user aptly put it, “I should’ve listened to the reviews, but I decided to just give them a shot.” My version would be more about, “I should’ve researched about the company first before giving them a shot.” But who knows if I would really listen to the reviews? I might just end up like the Reddit user.
From Side Hustle or Scam? What to Know About Data Annotation Work:
Data annotation sites often use algorithmic management to keep their costs low, which can result in the poor treatment that many workers experience, says Milagros Miceli, who leads the Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics research group at Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin. And because the data annotation industry is poorly regulated, companies rarely face consequences for substandard treatment of workers, she says.
What increased my discomfort is the lack of activity on the platform (more like having no activity at all), unlike the other data labeling platform, which hired me via Upwork. And so I deleted my account, not expecting them to delete my personal details (which I’m still trying to come to terms with today), and never looked back. I wasn’t just risking my personal data. I was about to become complicit in a system that treats human intelligence as disposable fuel for AI training. In fact, I was sucked into another rabbit hole: reading and watching documentaries about data labeling jobs—being the human in the loop in the age of AI.
While watching a 60 Minutes documentary, I was appalled to hear the company name and my country in one video, and listening to one of the workers describe the job as “modern day slavery,” offering jobs to countries with low-wage populations, highly educated, but unemployed.
After watching the video, I was relieved to have been out of it right before I even began (but still troubled about my personal information I shared with the platform). If I have been given a task within the platform, I might gain a deeper understanding of what the Kenyan people interviewed in the documentary were discussing. I could have been part of an AI sweatshop.
But in hindsight, I was somehow grateful to learn something out of my encounter and it snapped me out of my rose-colored idea about AI jobs being the future.
In another documentary, I was taken into another reality: the “ghost workers of AI.”
As one of the interviewees said, “You cannot do AI without the human aspect in it.”
They are also people who found themselves in exploitative AI jobs because they needed money. The familiar narrative reminded me of how I came across AI jobs, which eventually led me to write this blog post. I am mainly motivated to reach out to people who also view AI and AI jobs through rose-colored glasses, just as I did. And if that’s you, I also want you to see this side of AI, where real people with real stories are.
My takeaways from my experience is this: Do not act out of need and desperation, because most of the time, you make poor decisions.
And where greed and lies are, exploitation happens.
While in need and desperation, freelancers eat the crumbs and call it a blessing, while the tech oligarchs get richer. I never really thought deeply about how people are often considered disposable in a gig economy—just a number, a faceless cog in the machine.
My near-miss taught me something crucial: behind every ‘revolutionary’ AI system are real people—often desperate people—being paid pennies to make machines seem smarter. So, the next time we marvel at how human-like AI has become, we should remember there might be an actual human, somewhere, being treated as less than human to make that magic happen.
jessa 