"We already have something where AI would be very useful." "AI should serve to prevent human beings from doing those jobs." Among the comments to the investigation published these days in La Vanguardia by Ignacio Orovio and Gemma Saura about the terrible work carried out by the Meta moderators in Barcelona – so much so that 20% of them are on sick leave, mostly due to psychological problems derived of their exposure to violent content that must be filtered on Facebook and Instagram – technological solutionism abounds.
It sounds sensible: let artificial intelligence clean up after us, like a Roomba of the human soul. But letting the algorithm decide if the police should be called because that person who is broadcasting a live broadcast looks like he is about to take out a gun to commit suicide or if what is happening to that baby in that photo is abuse is not for nothing sensible. As expert Ramón López de Mántaras has said in this regard, “automated mechanisms fail because they do not understand the nuances… Humans have something they lack: common sense.”
AIs must be trained, and ethically and legally it is highly debatable that workers should expose their health more than necessary. The brain does not react the same to a traumatic image if it is shown briefly, or only a part, as it does if it has to stop to describe, label and explain to a machine why what is being seen is atrocious.
We hope that the same companies that created it will solve the problem. If today, as Orovio and Saura's reports explain, they harm the mental health of their moderators, apply policies designed for their self-protection and not that of the user, collaborate just enough with the authorities and disinvest in their ethical teams, why do we believe that tomorrow they will do better?
Violent and harmful content and its intensity is on the rise, and why it is happening is the real question we should be asking. None of this is inevitable. Nobody forces us to make this our present or our future. It is not even mandatory, Mántaras reminds, that social networks exist.
