Porn, dog poo and social media snaps: the ‘taskers’ scraping the internet for AI firm part-owned by Meta

Scale AI gig workers describe desperation of using people’s personal profiles and copyrighted work to train AI Tens of thousands of people have been paid by a company part-owned by Meta to train AI by combing Instagram accounts, harvesting copyrighted work and transcribing pornographic soundtracks, the Guardian can reveal. Scale AI, 49%-controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire, has recruited experts across fields such as medicine, physics and economics – putatively to refine top-level artificial intelligence systems through a platform called Outlier. “Become the expert that AI learns from,” it says on its site, advertising flexible work for people with strong credentials. However, workers for the platform said they have become involved in scraping an array of other people’s personal data – in what they described as a morally uncomfortable exercise that diverged significantly from refining high-level systems. Outlier is managed by Scale AI, which has contracts with the Pentagon and US defense companies. Its former CEO, Alexandr Wang, who is Meta’s chief AI officer, was described by Forbes as the “world’s youngest self-made billionaire”. Its former ma