MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — According to Wired, Google has fired 200 contract workers who were in charge of checking the quality of its AI products. There was a lot of controversy over the layoffs, which happened in two rounds last month. The workers said they were fired for speaking out about bad pay and working conditions.
Most of the personnel who were affected worked for GlobalLogic, a company owned by Hitachi. They were in charge of training Google’s Gemini chatbot to respond more like a person and testing the “AI overviews” function on Google’s web browser. Many were quite competent, such professors and authors with master’s degrees and PhDs.
Wired says that internal Google documents show that the corporation was using these people to train its AI system to evaluate its own responses, which would mean that it might replace human oversight. others who still work for the company are worried that they are training others to take their jobs.
The workers who were let go said they had a lot of problems, such as salary differences, not being told ahead of time that they were being let go, and having to work under a lot of pressure. They said they were given “task timers” of only five minutes for each task and were allegedly told they would be fired if they didn’t reach these deadlines.
The workers also say that when they tried to form a union by talking to each other in digital social spaces, the corporation limited access to these areas. One worker told Wired that they were let off after using the social rooms and filing a whistleblower complaint with Hitachi. The report also says that Google tried additional ways to get workers to quit, like requiring them to go back to the headquarters in Austin, Texas. This made it hard for certain workers with impairments or caregiving duties to keep working.
Google hasn’t said anything particular about the layoffs, although they did say that GlobalLogic is in charge of the working conditions of its employees. The dispute, on the other hand, has brought up again the ethical and labor issues that come up with the rapid growth of AI technology and the part that human workers play in making it.