Apparently, a hidden army of contract workers have been doing the behind-the-scenes labour of teaching AI systems how to analyse data to generate the kinds of text and images.

For example, to improve the accuracy of AI, humans label photos and predict what text the apps should generate next.

But the pay is rubbish -- $15 an hour with no benefits. It really is only the sort of thing you can do if you need to avoid homelessness and have another job.

Human feedback fills an urgent and endless need for the company and its AI competitors: providing streams of sentences, labels and other information that serve as training data.

Programme lead for AI, labour and the economy at the Partnership on AI, Sonam Jindal said that AI is still hugely reliant on a large human workforce.

Demand has increased, and some AI contract workers are asking for more. In Nairobi, Kenya, more than 150 people who've worked on AI for Facebook, TikTok, and ChatGPT voted Monday to form a union, citing low pay and the mental toll of the work, Time magazine reported

Time said that low-wage Kenyan labourers to label text that included hate speech or sexually abusive language so that its apps could do better at recognising toxic.

OpenAI has hired about 1,000 remote contractors in places such as Eastern Europe and Latin America to label data or train company software on computer engineering tasks, the online news outlet Semafor reported in January.