“The great false hope of Silicon Valley is automation.
But we’re only pretending—it’s actually humans behind it.”
This honest statement from Leila Janah, the founder of digital workforce provider Sama, sheds light on a fundamental tension at the heart of the emerging field of artificial intelligence. On the one hand, the phenomenon of machine learning is a true marvel, one that represents what the Vatican has called “a new and significant phase in humanity’s engagement with technology.” On the other hand, it’s hard to say that the machines in question are autonomously “learning” at all—since real human workers like Sama’s employees are the ones teaching them.
Sama connects powerful AI companies, located primarily in the U.S. and Europe, with laborers willing to work for low pay, primarily in East Africa. Data workers, as they are known, are the human intelligence that powers what we call “artificial intelligence”—the real people who help AIs make sense of their training data. For example, the only reason that an AI-powered “self-driving car” can be programmed to avoid other cars is because a human worker manually labeled pictures of cars so that the AI would “know” what they look like. Examples of this painstaking work on Sama’s website show the individual boxes that a data worker might draw around an object, then tag with an identifier like “car,” before repeating the process on thousands of images a day.
While data workers in fields like vehicle training face real challenges such as low pay, mental and physical strain, and difficult working conditions, many others experience outright trauma in the workplace due to the nature of the content they are tasked with labeling. Most digital media platforms have content moderation policies that prevent users from being unexpectedly exposed to graphic material, but in order to enforce those policies, platforms require an AI-powered algorithm that can easily recognize and remove problematic posts. Behind those seemingly mechanical algorithms are human data workers, who review and annotate this explicit content—often to their own psychological detriment.
The importance of these workers’ task stands in tension with the conditions they often face. “Every human person is created in the image of God and has a unique God-given dignity,” St. John Paul II once said. “Thus no one should be used as a mere instrument for production, as though the person were a machine or a beast of burden. The Church rejects any social or economic system that leads to the depersonalization of workers.”
This “depersonalization” manifests in a variety of ways in the context of AI. As the landmark Vatican document Antiqua et Nova outlines, our culture has increasingly begun to treat real human beings like the machines we have created—precisely because we enshrined in our machines what we wrongly value most in ourselves. In our productivity-focused culture, the document states, the concept of intelligence has been “reduced to the mere acquisition of facts or the ability to perform specific tasks.” As such, the capabilities of AI have been misunderstood as equivalent to those of human beings, because we culturally overvalue these particular aspects of human intelligence.
In this framework, human data workers risk being valued only insofar as they perform tasks. Other qualities of human intelligence—like embodiment and morality, which give rise to workers’ trauma responses and ethical concerns—are less valued and often set aside. Moreover, these offenses to the dignity of data workers are compounded by the untruthful way in which their labor is frequently erased from the public perception of this emerging technology.
As Catholics, we are committed to upholding the dignity of the human person in all circumstances. With the emergence of AI, we are called to defend that dignity in the workplace and to praise God for human intelligence in its fullness, while rejecting any media messages that would degrade or dismiss the human beings who are powering this technological revolution. In intercession for these needs of humanity, let us pray together.
Heavenly Father,
we praise you for the glorious vocation of humanity
whom you have invited to cooperate in creation and salvation
through the offering of our daily work.
Following your Son’s example of solidarity and compassion,
especially for those most exploited and marginalized,
we ask you to look with kindness and mercy
upon all who seek to provide for their families through data work
and protect them from all exploitation.
Send your Holy Spirit upon us
with his gifts of wisdom and understanding
that we may always honor the human beings
whose intelligence is falsely claimed as artificial.
May we value what you value,
cherish what you cherish,
and live as you would have us live.
We ask this through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
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Cover Image by Dimitri Conejo Sanz on Cathopic.