Finnish Startup Is Paying Prisoners Under $2 Per Hour To Train AI Behind The Bars

A Finnish startup is leveraging the cheap labor available in the country's prisons to train its artificial intelligence (AI) model by paying less than $2 an hour.

What Happened: Metroc, a Finnish startup that has a search engine aimed at construction companies, is using the services of prisoners to help train its AI model, reported Wired.

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The prisoners work in 3-hour shifts for which they get paid a measly $1.67 per hour.

The prisoner in question has no idea what she is doing and is not aware of the purpose either, leaving her to wonder if this is for a customer service chatbot.

Metroc's business model is based on providing construction companies with information on projects that are still hiring. Interested customers can use Metroc's search engine to look for these projects, and the company is using Finnish prisoners' services to help its AI model determine which projects are hiring and which are not.

Eventually, once its AI is trained well enough, it won't need the prisoners' services and will be able to address the questions of construction companies on its own.

The cost savings in deploying an AI model and Finnish prisoners’ low-cost services help Metroc reduce costs.

Ethical Concerns: Using cheap labor to train large language models is not new – the Microsoft Corp. MSFT backed OpenAI does this with click workers from India, Kenya, and Uganda.

The practice of using low-wage workers to train AI models could also have another unintended consequence – widening the wealth inequalities. "Research shows that automation trends may be widening the racial wealth gap," said a McKinsey study.

But Metroc's founder and CEO, Jussi Virnala, is trying to look at the positive side, saying, "This type of work is the future, and if we want to prepare prisoners for life outside prison, a life without crime, these types of skills might be at least as important as the traditional work types that prisons provide."

Image – Shutterstock

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