Kenyan data labelers organize against Meta and OpenAI vendors

Michael Geoffrey Asia spent eight-hour days in Kenya annotating pornography frame by frame for an AI data-labeling company, and role-playing personas for AI sex bots. He now runs the Data Labelers Association, a Kenyan organization pushing for "better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits" for the people who train, refine and moderate the outputs of Western AI products, 404 Media reported.

The work left Asia with insomnia and PTSD. "It got to a point where my body couldn't function," he told the outlet. "Where I saw someone naked, I don't even feel it." The chatbot role-play carried its own cognitive load. "It required a lot of creativity and fast thinking. Because if I'm talking to a man, I'm supposed to act like a woman."

At the DLA's largest event so far, held last month at the Nairobi Arboretum, many speakers withheld their full names. One, identified only as Angela, drew a line from the companies now contracting annotation work in Kenya back to the British Imperial East Africa Company. "These multinationals are coming to rule and dominate here," she said. "It's Apple, it's Meta, it's Gemini. Those are the ones we're still fighting."

Those names reach Kenyan workers through contractors. Sama, a San Francisco-headquartered "data annotation and labeling company" with a Nairobi office, has supplied labeling work to Meta and OpenAI and has been sued repeatedly in Kenya over low pay and worker PTSD. Members of the DLA, who make a few dollars a day for this work, are trying to turn individual grievances into collective leverage against the Western firms that ultimately buy the output.