Usually corrective labor in prisons is associated with physical labor, but inmates of two correctional institutions in Finland are doing completely unexpected work for such places - sorting and classifying information that is used to train artificial intelligence algorithms commissioned by the startup Vainu, which develops AI technologies. The company itself believes that such a practice is an excellent opportunity for the prisoners themselves to learn new skills, but outside experts say that it is very similar to the economic exploitation of people, since they pay pennies for it.
According to the portal The Verge, which conveys the words of the co-founder of the company Tuomas Rasil, Vainu is creating an extensive database of organizations around the world that help businesses find contractors for a particular job. For this, it is necessary to proofread hundreds of thousands of business articles published on the Internet, marking information relevant to a particular task. For example, two articles are given: one about a technology company Apple, and the other about a company that has the word "apple" in it. The necessary article is marked by the employee, gets into a special database, from where it is "fed" to the artificial intelligence algorithm for training it.
Working with articles in English Vainu does not cause problems. The company simply set up an account on Amazon Mechanical Turk (the platform allows companies to break down work into small tasks and offer them to people around the world). However, as Rasila points out, this platform “has not been very useful if you need to work with Finnish”. Vainu has only one intern who can efficiently and quickly mark many articles written in Finnish.
So it turned out that Vainu's office is located in the same building as the headquarters of the Finnish Criminal Administration (CSA), and then the company had an idea: why not use prison labor for this work?
The collaboration between CSA and Vainu began about three months ago. The company is currently working with two Finnish prisons - one in Helsinki and the other in Turku. Vainu has supplied 10 computers to each one and pays for each task performed by the prisoners directly by the CSA. The company points out that the cost is comparable to working on the Mechanical Turk platform (the average pay on this platform is $ 2 per hour), the only difference is that the salaries of prisoners are calculated by the CSA, which also selects prisoners to organize data.
According to Rasil, CSA is very pleased with the cooperation, since the new kind of corrective work does not require the use of any special equipment - only a laptop is needed.
Working in the same metalworking, and having access to tools, prisoners are quite capable of turning them into homemade weapons, adds the head of Vainu. According to his calculations, a little less than a hundred prisoners now work for the company. Their employment is "only a few hours a day." Whether this is really so, The Verge, which contacted CSA for a comment, has not yet been able to find out.
Given the current scope of tasks, Vainu and CSA signed a cooperation agreement for a year. In the future, the company plans to organize cooperation with other Finnish prisons, and later - to enter other markets, working with other local languages. In their opinion, this will benefit all parties. One of the reasons that can motivate prisoners to do this work, of course, is the possibility of earning money. For companies like Vainu, however, “the main concern here is likely to be the growing demand for AI training using huge databases around the world,” Rasila said. CSA shares a positive view of the issue and adds,that such programs are an excellent way to broaden the range of jobs available for prisoners "in line with the demands of the modern world of work."
According to Lilly Irani, a communications professor at the University of California, San Diego, to whom The Verge approached for comment, the demand for such a work activity in many countries can become very high over time. This is due to the fact that AI algorithms must be trained taking into account the cultural and other characteristics of certain countries, and most people working with the same Mechanical Turk are residents of the United States.
According to Rasil, such work allows them to develop new skills that may be useful in the future, but at the same time notes that the tasks performed by prisoners do not require any special knowledge from them. The only thing that is required of them is literacy. And this, in turn, casts doubt on the usefulness of such work in other areas, where it is also required to classify more specific information, for example, scientific.
How do you like this idea of correctional labor?
Nikolay Khizhnyak