Sisyphean Labor Instantiation Device (SLIDE) : Using Critical Design to Make the Precarious Human Labor in AI Tangible

Sammanfattning

The ongoing excitement over artificial intelligence is dominated by fanciful narratives that extol its virtues or warn of its risks, eclipsing the realities of the production, operation, and use of this technology, which are often highly problematic. Notable among them are the precarious conditions of scores of human workers –many of them located in the Global South– who produce, compile, cleanup, and label the training data which are a crucial component in the AI production pipeline. The present thesis details the process of designing, building, and evaluating the Sisyphean Labor Instantiation Device (SLIDE), a critical prototype with a physical user interface. This Research through Design (RtD) project aims to shed light on the critical design considerations necessary to make the labor of these workers tangible to the users of the prototype in an attempt to elicit reflections that challenge the status quo and encourage them to imagine alternative futures.