The Work of AI: Ethics and governance of automation (TRIA)

Led by a team with mixed skills in SHS and computer science, this project studies the production sites of artificial intelligence. We are studying “micro-work” platforms, which allocate crowds of individuals to small, standardized tasks of annotation and data preparation to feed machine learning algorithms. We contribute to the emerging literature on this phenomenon by exploring its ramifications in a country, Spain, which has so far remained in the shadows despite the strong presence of these practices. With data from an original empirical survey, analyzed using statistical techniques as well as state-of-the-art language processing methods, in particular spoken, we address important and hitherto under-theorized issues of governance of digital platforms, online work ethics, and the consequences (for example in terms of bias) of using these humans in the production of artificial intelligence.

The TRIA project was funded by the CNRS, as part of the 2020 call for projects “Scientific and social issues of artificial intelligence” of the Mission for transversal and interdisciplinary initiatives (MITI). Funding was renewed in 2021.

This project, led by Paola Tubaro (LRI-CNRS), brought together laboratories in computer science and human and social sciences:

  • Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique (Nacéra Seghouani Bennacer, Paola Tubaro, Elinor Wahal, UMR 8623, CNRS, Université Paris-Saclay)
  • Institut Interdisciplinaire de l’Innovation (Antonio Casilli, UMR 9217, CNRS, Institut Mines-Télécom)
  • Centre Internet et Société (Francesca Musiani, Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, UPR 2000, CNRS)
  • Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Systèmes aléatoires (Tristan Allard, David Gross-Amblard, UMR 6074, CNRS, Université Rennes 1)
  • Laboratoire d’Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l’ingénieur (Gilles Adda, Lori Lamel, Ioana Vasilescu, UPR 3251, CNRS)
  • Departamento de Antropología Social y Cultural (Miranda J. Lubbers, José Luís Molina González, Hugo Valenzuela García, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
  • Departamento de Sociología y Antropología Social (Antonio Santos Ortega, Universitat de València).