AI became one of the year’s biggest stories, a conflict between Silicon Valley hype and everyone else’s existential fear about the future of work, somehow all instigated by a technology that could convincingly write cheery emails and render images from prompts like “Mario riding a unicorn.” But even as AI startups were valued in the billions, there was a dearth of reporting on how these language models function and the human labor they require. In Josh Dzieza’s extraordinary feature, the veil is lifted to reveal the huge number of people that prop up the so-called “magic” of AI, a deliberately hidden workforce of millions whose jobs are a preview of what the future of work will actually look like.
