TechTakes

God help us. These workers are employed by a subcontractor, Covalen.

Multiple workers from Covalen’s ‘AI annotation’ service spoke to The Journal Investigates about their roles. Their day-to-day work involves creating prompts that are fed to Meta’s AI platform so the system can be trained according to guidelines.

In order to do this, some workers have spent entire shifts pretending to be paedophiles online seeking child sex abuse related information, or suicidal people looking for details on how to kill or hurt themselves.

Covalen also does moderation for Meta, with workers forced to watch extremely violent and disturbing footage that has been flagged for moderation.

“Sometimes in my dreams I am the victim, but sometimes – and this is far worse – I am the perpetrator,” they said.

One bright spot:

Over 100 Covalen employees have now joined the Communications Workers Union (CWU). The toll that dealing with sensitive content and inconsistencies in wellness break length were extra motivating factors for the move.

They are also asking for a better rate of pay, as they are currently earning an average of €29,700 per year.