Brown Senior Maps 13 Data Labelers to 141 AI Customers

A Brown University undergraduate has put the data-labeling supply chain behind modern AI onto a single public map.

The project, by senior Cunyan Ma and published by Brown, connects 13 data-labeling companies to 141 corporate customers across 31 countries, with worker sites concentrated in Kenya, Indonesia, Colombia and other Global South nations. It is live at ai-materiality-map.org/data-workers/.

The tasks on the map are the mundane and the grim. Workers label photos, transcribe speech, rate chatbot responses and identify features in medical scans. They also, Ma says, include "folks around the world who have to read paragraph after paragraph of AI-produced child pornography, bestiality, violent content" so that safety systems can be trained on it.

Ma's framing is explicit. The goal, she said, is to "visualize the idea of AI colonialism in an impactful and immediately accessible manner." The project is advised by Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of Brown's Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination and Redesign, and Ma plans to extend the mapping to the semiconductor industry and other layers of digital-infrastructure materiality.

The map arrives into a run of coverage: our tracker has logged 102 jobs-and-AI stories in the last 90 days, including an ITU warning this morning that an AI "opportunity divide" could deepen global inequality.