Artificial intelligence as heteromation

Faculty Associate David Nemer and coauthor André Sobal draw attention to the human labor powering purportedly autonomous AI systems. AI systems are, they argue, "heteromated": "dependent on human labor." The authors contend, further, that AI systems are embedded in (and thus essentially dependent upon) human infrastructure. "The labor of ghost workers, crowdworkers, and content moderators does not merely supplement automation; it animates it. It gives so-called intelligent systems their meaning, their data, and their utility. Ghost work is not merely the result of labor arbitrage or technological gap-filling—it is sustained by global economic inequality, platform logics that devalue certain kinds of labor, and narratives of automation that mask dependence."

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