We already have something in which AI would be very useful." "AI should be used to prevent human beings from developing these jobs". Among the comments on the research published these days in La Vanguardia by Ignacio Orovio and Gemma Saura on the terrible work carried out by the moderators of Meta in Barcelona - so much so that 20% of them are on leave, mostly due to psychological problems arising from the their exposure to the violent content that they have to filter on Facebook and Instagram – technological solutionism abounds.
It sounds sensible: let artificial intelligence clean up what we mess up, like a Roomba of the human soul. But let the algorithm decide if you need to call the police because that person who is live streaming looks like they are about to pull out a gun to kill themselves or if what is happening to that baby in that photo is abuse not it is not sensible at all. As the expert Ramón López de Mántaras has said on the matter, "automated mechanisms fail to solve problems because they do not understand the nuances... Humans have something they lack: common sense."
AIs need to be trained, and ethically and legally it is very 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 part of it, than 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 damage the mental health of their moderators, apply policies designed for their self-protection and not that of the user, cooperate fairly with the authorities and disinvest in the their ethical teams, why do we think they will do better tomorrow?
Violent and harmful content and its intensity is on the rise, and why is it happening is the real question we should be asking. None of this is inevitable. No one is forcing us to make this our present, or our future. It is not even mandatory, reminds Mántaras, that social networks exist.
