Draft:Data Annotation (Website)

Data Annotation, under the address of dataannotation.tech, is a an American data labeling platform owned by Surge Labs Inc. (although the website only mentions this in its Terms of Service, i.e contract.) It is a platform where people sign up, and get to perform tasks, provided that they successfully pass the qualifications. Tasks range from specialized fields such as computer programming, to non-specialized tasks such as everyday chatbot talk tasks. Payment starts from $20/h to $100+/h. These tasks are mostly done by training and tuning AI models from Surge's customers, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Anthropic.

Criticism

As mentioned earlier, the website is criticized for its lack of transparency about its affiliation to Surge, Anthropic, etc. This would cause workers to think that the models they train are independently from Surge, while in reality they are from Surge's customers like Anthropic. This is problematic because workers aren't directly told that Anthropic plays a role in Military's Project Maven, and is actively used to select targets for the U.S Military. Project Maven has recently been blamed for listing the Minab School as a target, which resulted in the death of 120 schoolchildren.