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Cited by 66Ethics and Social Impacts of AIDigital Economy and Work TransformationTechnology's Impact on Media

Lifting the curtain: Strategic visibility of human labour in AI-as-a-Service

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Newlands, Gemma·2021·Big Data & Society
DOI 10.1177/20539517211016026
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Abstract

Artificial Intelligence-as-a-Service (AIaaS) empowers individuals and organisations to access AI on-demand, in either tailored or ‘off-the-shelf’ forms. However, institutional separation between development, training and deployment can lead to critical opacities, such as obscuring the level of human effort necessary to produce and train AI services. Information about how, where, and for whom AI services have been produced are valuable secrets, which vendors strategically disclose to clients depending on commercial interests. This article provides a critical analysis of how AIaaS vendors manipulate the visibility of human labour in AI production based on whether the vendor relies on paid or unpaid labour to fill interstitial gaps. Where vendors are able to occlude human labour in the organisational ‘backstage,’ such as in data preparation, validation or impersonation, they do so regularly, further contributing to ongoing techno-utopian narratives of AI hype. Yet, when vendors must co-produce the AI service with the client, such as through localised AI training, they must ‘lift the curtain’, resulting in a paradoxical situation of needing to both perpetuate dominant AI hype narratives while emphasising AI’s mundane limitations.

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  • Workers' labor disappears from corporate imaginaries of progress, maintaining the mythology of AI as a technological achievement.

    “While the data work industry is rapidly growing and becoming increasingly structured and professionalized, workers’ labor disappears from corporate imaginaries of progress [21, 41, 55, 137], which serves to maintain the mythology of AI as a technological achievement [11, 68, 99].”

    From 'The plan is just survival': Data Work in Kenya and the Regime of Entrapment (2026) · cites this paper as [99]

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Newlands, G.
Affiliations
BI Norwegian Business School (NO)
Corresponding author
Newlands, Gemma
ORCID
Newlands, Gemma
Venue
Big Data & Society
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2021-01
Volume
8
Issue
1
ISSN
2053-9517 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1177/20539517211016026
OpenAlex
W3160182997
Cited by
66
References
9
Citations by year
2026: 17 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 1
FWCI
10.95
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Big Data & Society (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
Norges Forskningsråd (275347)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Safety Research › Ethics and Social Impacts of AI
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Digital Economy and Work Transformation
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Technology's Impact on Media
Keywords
AI-as-a-Service, data preparation, AI training, AI hype, techno-utopianism, backstage work

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