Experts warn about Appen’s US military AI work

Experts say Australian company Appen’s alarming use of global workers to unwittingly train artificial intelligence for the US military shows how tech companies are zealously profiting from war and surveillance while disregarding their workers.

This week, a joint Bureau of Investigative Journalism and cricket The investigation found that Sydney-headquartered data company Appen had signed contracts worth millions of dollars providing language training data to secret US military units.

Appen employs workers from around the world, including refugee camps in Kenya, to transcribe and tag sounds in languages ​​like Somali on short-term and temporary basis.